Long‐Term Ventilator Treatment for Patients With Respiratory Failure After Major Abdominal Surgery

Since September 1964, more than one hundred surgical patients have received prolonged ventilator treatment in the Kings County Hospital Center. Our attention has been particularly directed to the application of this therapy in patients who had major abdominal surgery. This represents 60 per cent of the patients whom we treated by prolonged artificial ventilation. We have been impressed, as have others, with the extraordinarily high mortality in this group (1, 2, 3). Accordingly, we have examined our clinical experiences, in an effort to analyse the clinico-pathologic features involved in these patients.