An Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome Patient Successfully Treated with Noninvasive Mechanical Ventilation

Abstract

Since still controversial and not often applied, we would like to share our acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) patient successfully treated with noninvasive mechanical ventilation. A 26 year-old male patient with the diagnosis of Burkitt lymphoma was admitted to our intensive care unit because of neutropenic fever and sepsis-induced ARDS after chemotherapy. Although PO2/FiO2=114.2, we started non-invasive mechanical ventilation since the patient was conscious and cooperative. Non-invasive mechanical ventilation and spontaneous respiration experiments were successfully managed according to the intermittent arterial blood gas results and the need for non-invasive mechanical ventilation was disappeared at the end of 72 hours. Especially in the early phases of ARDS and in selected patients non-invasive mechanical ventilation should be tried before intubation but invasive mechanical ventilation should not be delayed if the patient deteriorates.

Keywords

• Acute respiratory distress syndrome
• non-invasive ventilation
• immunosuppressive patient
• acute respiratory failure