Department of General Internal Medicine, Medical Intensive Care Unit, University Hospital Gasthuisberg, Herestraat 49, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Crit Care. 2010;14(2):221. doi: 10.1186/cc8925.
The availability of advanced diagnostic tools has grown in the past decades. Hence, a growing false belief exists that everything is known about the patient before death. Moreover, intensivists may wrongly believe that autopsy findings do not contribute to the understanding of pathophysiological events. The immediate result is that few ICUs nowadays assemble enough autopsy cases with new and interesting clinicopathological features. However, we believe that, at least in tertiary ICUs, autopsies remain a valuable examination, as a tool for quality control, as a way of establishing gold standards for diagnostic examinations and as an aid in developing guidelines for treatment and diagnosis of diseases frequently encountered in the ICU. Finally, due to the ever-expanding armamentarium of immunosuppressive agents, a growing list of opportunistic infections is discovered during autopsy. The present article gives an overview of autopsy studies conducted in the ICU and discusses the pros and cons of performing these.
在过去的几十年中，先进的诊断工具变得越来越普及。因此，人们逐渐产生了一种错误的信念，认为在患者死亡之前，已经对其了如指掌。此外，重症监护医生可能错误地认为尸检结果对理解病理生理事件没有帮助。其直接后果是，现在很少有 ICU 能够收集到足够的具有新的有趣临床病理特征的尸检病例。然而，我们认为，至少在三级 ICU 中，尸检仍然是一种有价值的检查手段，可作为质量控制的工具、建立诊断检查金标准的方法，以及协助制定 ICU 中常见疾病的治疗和诊断指南。最后，由于免疫抑制剂的不断增加，尸检过程中发现了越来越多的机会性感染。本文概述了 ICU 中进行的尸检研究，并讨论了进行这些研究的利弊。
