ARDS in Children and ECMO Initiation Strategies Impact on Neurodevelopment (ASCEND)
University of Michigan
Summary
ASCEND researchers are partnering with families of children who receive extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) after a sudden failure of breathing named pediatric acute respiratory distress syndrome (PARDS). ECMO is a life support technology that uses an artificial lung outside of the body to do the lung's work. ASCEND has two objectives. The first objective is to learn more about children's abilities and quality of life among ECMO-supported children in the year after they leave the pediatric intensive care unit. The second objective is to compare short and long-term patient outcomes in two groups of children: one group managed with a mechanical ventilation protocol that reserves the use of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) until protocol failure to another group supported on ECMO per usual care.
Description
Decades after extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) was first used to support children with severe pediatric acute respiratory distress syndrome (PARDS), pediatric intensivists lack both prospective studies of long-term outcomes in ECMO for PARDS and well-powered studies comparing the impact of ECMO initiation strategies on mortality and morbidity. While clinicians lack the equipoise necessary to randomize ECMO in dying children, there is uncertainty on if and when it is best to initiate ECMO to preserve survival, functioning, and quality of life. To determine if and when ECMO should be i…