Endocrine Aspects of Acute Illness

Abstract

In critical care medicine, greatest advances have come about through understanding the metabolic consequences of illness and injury and the methods of physiologic correction that can restore a patient to normal homeostasis. Underlying this statement from the preface there is a theme—compensation in critical care—that forms the core of this book. Overall the authors have followed this theme. From Thyroid Function in Critical Illness to Neuropeptides in Shock and Trauma, the chapters outline the physiologic changes that accompany critical illness, the body's compensating responses, and the treatments that best help these responses. Surgeons will find helpful the information given about calcium, phosphorus, glucose, and magnesium metabolism, about the euthyroid-sick syndrome, myxedema coma, and reverse-triiodothyronine, and there is an excellent discussion of thyrotropin-releasing hormone in the treatment of hemorrhagic and anaphylactic shock. But sometimes the reading becomes a challenge. For example, in the chapter An Introduction to Prostaglandins and