End-Expiratory Occlusion Test During Increase of Vasomotor Tone in a Rabbit Model of Hemorrhage

End-expiratory occlusion test (EEOT) has been proposed as a preload responsiveness test that overcomes several limitations of pulse pressure (PPV) and stroke volume (SVV) variations. We compared the ability of EEOT versus SVV and PPV to predict fluid responsiveness during the increase of the vasomotor tone in a rabbit model of hemorrhage. Ten rabbits were anesthetized, paralyzed, and mechanically ventilated during basal load (BL), after progressive blood withdrawal (BW), and after volume replacement. Other two sets of data were obtained during vasomotor increase by phenylephrine (PHE) infusion in BL and BW. We estimated the change of stroke volume (∆SV_EEOT) and aortic flow (∆AoF_EEOT) during the EEOT. PPV and SVV were obtained by the variation of beat-to-beat PP and SV, respectively. Baseline PPV, SVV, ∆SV_EEOT, and ∆AoF_EEOT increased significantly after BW, with a decrease of aortic flow (P < 0.05). PHE induced a significant decrease of PPV and SVV, but without affecting ∆SV_EEOT, and ∆AoF_EEOT. We conclude that ∆SV and ∆AoF during EEOT kept the ability to predict fluid responsiveness during PHE infusion in a rabbit hemorrhage model. This result may suggest the advantage of EEOT with respect to SVV and PPV in predicting fluid responsiveness during vasomotor tone increase.