Highlighting the important effect of systemic lupus erythematosus on platelet count of critically ill patients

摘要

During the H1N1 viral respiratory epidemic some patients required admission to the intensive care unit (ICU), and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) was sometimes used after failure of conventional ventilation [1, 2]. Infectious complications of ECMO are ranked second after hemorrhagic complications and are mainly represented by bloodstream infections (BSI) with gram-positive cocci [3, 4]. We report the .-main clinical and microbiological findings of 16 patients (Table 1) with H1N1-ARDS treated with or without ECMO in a regional referral ICU according to the Italian guidelines [2, 5].