PicPod 55 was all about Lactate: this one’s about the opposite (in some ways): Oxygen. Mark Peters is a professor of Paediatric Intensive Care at Great Ormond St Hospital in London. He is leading the Oxy-PICU trial, looking at whether a targeted saturation of 88-92% is different to 94-98% in ventilated children.
Why should they be different? What are the risks of giving more oxygen? Are there local or endothelial effects? Or is there an increased length of stay, increased ventilation, and more ventilatory trauma? Is there a lower limit to how low we can go, or are we just constrained by history?
Is there an oxygen saturation number which is unequivocally bad (yes there is)? What are the next steps in oxygen saturation research?
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