PCCM Audio Summary - August 2025
The August 2025 issue of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine (PCCM) features original research articles that evaluate long-term survival of children discharged from the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), post-sepsis care needs in children after hospital admission, use of a machine learning model to predict cardiac death within one hour after terminal extubation, and associations between hyperprocalcitonemia and endothelial and microcirculatory dysfunction in children with sepsis and septic shock and clinical outcomes. Clinical investigation articles examine the logistics of infant organ donation after death by circulatory criteria, child and family outcomes after PICU admission, hyperlactatemia in critically ill children on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and biomarkers in viral or bacterial pneumonia and associations with pediatric acute respiratory distress syndrome and sepsis. The PCCM conference report and expert panel highlights the first recommended pediatric palliative care subcompetencies for pediatric critical medicine fellows, and the research letter discusses the possible benefits and risks of powering down devices in the PICU. The PCCM narrative is an interesting theoretical perspective on new life from a newborn’s point-of-view.
