Therapeutic range of spontaneous breathing during mechanical ventilation.

In the 4th century before the common era, the Greek philosopher and physician Hippocrates expressed his wisdom on the value of activity to the sick and the healthy by stating that: “The sick will of course profit to a great extent from gymnastics with regard to the restoration of their health and the healthy will profit with regard to its maintenance” (On Regimen in Acute Diseases, 3, 400 BCE). In contemporary critical care medicine, driven by the goal of protecting our patients from self-inflicted injury, pain, and anxiety – and in contrast to Hippoctrates’ suggestions – we have built a culture of immobilizing our patients: we prescribe high doses of opioids, sedatives, anxiolytics, and anti-pychotics, and with the best intentions, place bed-rest and restraints orders. In patients with severe respiratory failure, we frequently use immobilizing ventilator settings such as volume control ventilation. Recent data have been increasingly challenging this tenet in relation to the fields of neuropsychiatry, rehabilitation, and respiratory medicine1–5. In this issue of Anesthesiology, two papers bring new information on why the concept of muscle activity is also relevant to lung biochemistry and regional function. Guldner et al.6 and Bruells et al.7 provide important experimental data on the relationship between the dose of diaphragmatic activity (spontaneous contribution to breathing during mechanical ventilation) and the resulting response in terms of lung mechanical stress, gas exchange, and markers of muscle deconditioning. As the main respiratory muscle, the diaphragm contributes 72% for tidal breathing8 and its role in respiratory mechanics and gas exchange goes well beyond this global number. One of the reasons is its curvature during spontaneous breathing in the supine position, which facilitates expansion of dependent lung regions9, optimizes the regional distribution of lung ventilation, and prevents loss of dependent lung aeration and increase in shunt observed when muscle paralysis is produced10. Accordingly, modes of ventilation proposed since the 1970s tried to explore those advantages in patients with acute respiratory failure. The beneficial effects of maintaining continuous spontaneous breathing during mechanical ventilation of patients with acute respiratory failure have been described by Putensen and coworkers in two well-designed studies11,12. However, in patients with severe respiratory failure, barriers to spontaneous breathing during mechanical ventilation including patient-ventilator asynchrony, high oxygen consumption of the respiratory pump muscles, and the risk of barotrauma, have hindered a clear determination of the value of spontaneous breathing during mechanical ventilation.