Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome

Excerpt

A combined sense of frustration and encouragement must have attended the writing and compilation of the contributions to this volume on adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS): frustration because mortality from ARDS remains high nearly 25 years after Ashbaugh and coworkers applied the term "respiratory distress" to adults and encouragement because so much of the information necessary to influence outcome has been acquired during the same period. For any observer of the ARDS-related clinical and investigational efforts over these years, it is particularly striking to see which concepts have survived more or less intact, which concepts are new, and, most interesting