Weakness acquired in the cardiac intensive care unit: still the elephant in the room?

Over the past two decades, the cardiac critical care population has shifted to increasingly comorbid and elderly patients often presenting with nonprimary cardiac conditions that exacerbate underlying advanced cardiac disease. Consequently, the modern cardiac intensive care unit (CICU) patient has poor outcome regardless of left ventricular ejection fraction. Importantly, delayed liberation from organ support, independent from premorbid health status and admission severity of illness, has been associated with increased morbidity and mortality up to years post-general critical care. Although a constellation of several acquired morbidities is at play, the most prominent enactor of poor long-term outcome in this population appears to be intensive care unit acquired weakness. Although the specific burden of ICU-acquired morbidities in CICU patients is yet to be clearly defined, it seems unfathomable that patients will not accrue some sort of ICU-related morbidity. There is hence an urgent need to better establish the exact benefit and cost of resource-intensive strategies in both short- and long-term survival of the CICU patient. Consequent and standardized documentation of admission comorbidities, severity of illness indicators, relevant ICU-related complications including weakness, and long-term post-ICU morbidity outcomes can help our understanding of the disease continuum and how to better care for the CICU survivor and their families and caregivers. Given increasing budgetary pressure on healthcare systems worldwide, interventions targeting CICU patients should focus on improving patient-centred long-term outcomes in a cost-effective manner. It will require a holistic and transmural continuity of care model to meet the challenges associated with treating critically ill cardiac patients in the future.