Cutaneous vascular reactivity and flow motion response to vasopressin in advanced vasodilatory shock and severe postoperative multiple organ dysfunction syndrome

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Vasopressin, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Disturbances in microcirculatory homeostasis have been hypothesized to play a key role in the pathophysiology of multiple organ dysfunction syndrome and vasopressor-associated ischemic skin lesions.

The effects of a supplementary arginine vasopressin (AVP) infusion on microcirculation in vasodilatory shock and postoperative multiple organ dysfunction syndrome are unknown.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 18 patients taking part.

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

Patients were randomly assigned to receive a combined infusion of AVP/norepinephrine or norepinephrine alone.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Vasopressin and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Demographic and clinical data were recorded at study entry and after 1 hour.

A laser Doppler flowmeter was used to measure the cutaneous microcirculatory response at randomization and after 1 hour.

Reactive hyperaemia and oscillatory changes in the Doppler signal were measured during the 3 minutes before and after a 5-minute period of forearm ischaemia.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Arginine Vasopressin, Blood Flow Velocity, Hyperemia, Microcirculation, Multiple Organ Failure, Norepinephrine and Postoperative Complications.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Vasopressin in 18 patients.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Its findings take up roughly 5 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2006 (Critical care (London, England)), a journal based in England.

More context: the Vasopressin compound page, all human trials.