Prediction of prognosis in intensive care patients

The treatment of intensive care patients is complex and sometimes unrewarding. The identification of factors that predict the outcome of these patients would make treatment easier to evaluate. Various pulmonary, cardiovascular and metabolic variables have been tested as prognostic measures. They have so far not been found conclusively reliable. It seems as if measurements of factors in the cascade systems, in particular prekallikrein, Hageman factor, and antithrombin III may be the best available indexes to predict a fatal outcome.