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Book cover ARDS Acute Respiratory Distress in Adults

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Abstract

The definition of the syndrome of acute respiratory distress in adults (ARDS) was first limited to acute lung injury, but has now been expanded to include the diffuse alveolar-capillary damage that occurs as a component of the systemic inflammatory response and multiple system organ failure. When Ash-baugh et al. described ARDS in 1967, they recognized that the clinical syndrome had been described almost twenty years earlier as ‘congestive atelectasis’ [2], but characterized ARDS more precisely as ‘severe dyspnea, hypoxemia, and diffuse bilateral pulmonary infiltrates following acute lung injury in previously healthy persons’ [3]. In recent years it has become clear that ARDS is really the pulmonary manifestation of systemic, multiple organ failure usually associated with sepsis and widespread, uncontrolled intravascular inflammation [4].

Uncontrolled septicemia leads to frothy pulmonary edema that resembles serum, not the sanguineous transudative edema fluid of... congestive heart failure.

William Osler, 1927 [1].

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Authors
  1. Molly L. Osborne
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  2. Robert J. Meyer
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Heart & Lung Institute, USA

    Timothy W. Evans MD, FRCP, PhD (Reader in Critical Care Medicine, Consultant in Thoracic and Intensive Care Medicine) (Reader in Critical Care Medicine, Consultant in Thoracic and Intensive Care Medicine)

  2. Royal Brompton Hospital, Sydney Street, London, SW3 6NP, UK

    Timothy W. Evans MD, FRCP, PhD (Reader in Critical Care Medicine, Consultant in Thoracic and Intensive Care Medicine) (Reader in Critical Care Medicine, Consultant in Thoracic and Intensive Care Medicine)

  3. University of Edinburgh, Royal Infirmary, Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, EH3 9YW, UK

    Christopher Haslett FRCP, FRCP (Edin) (Professor of Respiratory Medicine, Chairman of the Department of Medicine (RIE) and Director of the Rayne Laboratories) (Professor of Respiratory Medicine, Chairman of the Department of Medicine (RIE) and Director of the Rayne Laboratories)

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Osborne, M.L., Meyer, R.J. (1996). Epidemiology. In: Evans, T.W., Haslett, C. (eds) ARDS Acute Respiratory Distress in Adults. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3430-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3430-7_2

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