Driving Pressure and Survival in the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome

Mechanical-ventilation strategies that use lower end-inspiratory (plateau) airway pressures, lower tidal volumes (VT), and higher positive end-expiratory pressures (PEEPs) can improve survival in patients with the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), but the relative importance of each of these components is uncertain. Because respiratory-system compliance (CRS) is strongly related to the volume of aerated remaining functional lung during disease (termed functional lung size), we hypothesized that driving pressure (ΔP=VT/CRS), in which VT is intrinsically normalized to functional lung size (instead of predicted lung size in healthy persons), would be an index more strongly associated with survival than VT or PEEP in patients who are not actively breathing.