If your way of determining whether a patient is fluid responsive or not is to see if the blood pressure went up after giving a bolus, you are doing it WRONG! You need to stop, take a deep breath, and reassess your way of thinking about fluid responsiveness. This (FREE!) article dives into why fluids should not be provided arbitrarily go make us feel good inside and make us feel like we at least "did something" in response to that low mean arterial pressure. No, I do not use SBP and DBP off of the BP cuff in my practice. More on that at another time. This article also goes briefly into why we should not be checking CVP (duh). Bottom line is that we can't accurately predict fluid responsiveness without an arterial line and some sort of device to predict stroke volume, stroke volume variation, cardiac index/output. You could have some really good echo nunchuck skills as well. This study also emphasizes why looking at IVC variations is not the best test. Ultimately, we all need to get better at this, myself included. I feel that this article is particularly important for nurses as you all are the ones who relay the BP concerns to the clinicians essentially ordering the fluids. These three authors are legends of critical care. A real treat that Annals of Intensive Care published this for free.
This article is going to be part of the bibliography for the talk I will be giving in Portland, OR in August of 2020.
-EJ
Monnet, X., Marik, P.E. & Teboul, J. Prediction of fluid responsiveness: an update. Ann. Intensive Care 6, 111 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13613-016-0216-7
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