Proportional assist versus pressure support ventilation in patients with acute respiratory failure: Cardiorespiratory responses to artificially increased ventilatory demand*

Abstract

In patients with acute respiratory failure, dynamic inspiratory pressure assistance modalities are not superior to PSV with respect to cardiorespiratory function and inspiratory muscles unloading after increasing ventilatory demand. The latter might be explained by higher peak flows resulting in nonlinearly increased resistive workload that was incompletely compensated by PAV+ATC.