Does high PEEP prevent alveolar cycling?

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) patients need mechanical ventilation to sustain gas exchange. Animal experiments showed that mechanical ventilation with high volume/plateau pressure and no positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP) damages healthy lungs, while low tidal volumes and the application of higher PEEP levels are protective. PEEP makes the lung homogeneous, reducing the pressure multiplication at the interface between lung units with different inflation statuses and keeps the lung open through the whole respiratory cycle, avoiding intratidal opening and closing. Four randomized clinical trials tested a higher PEEP strategy compared to a lower PEEP strategy but failed to show any survival benefit. These results, which apparently contradict preclinical data, may be explained by CT scanning, which investigates the behaviour of ARDS lung upon inflation and deflation demonstrating that: (1) 15 cmH₂O PEEP is insufficient to overcome the closing pressures of the lung and keep it open through the whole respiratory cycle; (2) lung recruitment is continuous along the volume-pressure curve. The application of a PEEP level around 15 cmH₂O does not abolish opening and closing, but the lung region undergoing opening and closing is simply shifted downward, i. e. becomes more vertebral in the supine patient. (3) Recruited lung tissue becomes poorly inflated and not well inflated; poorly inflated tissue is inhomogeneous: while increasing PEEP the reduction in lung inhomogeneity is small or non-existent.