Diagnosing adrenal insufficiency in critical illness: time to go back to the start

Diagnosing and delineating the thresholds for “adrenal insufficiency” in critical illness is still the subject of many manuscripts, hours of conference time and the subject of “position statements” [1]. This is because the existence of the disorder, how to diagnose it (if it exists) and how to treat it are still controversial. The funda mental problem in moving towards answering these questions is that we still do not have an accurate model for HPA axis function in critical illness. The linked paper by Mongardon and colleagues[2] adds another small piece to the jigsaw, but in the process, it illustrates many of the reasons we still haven’t made forward progress.
Source: Resuscitation - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Editorial Source Type: research