In June 2023, Intensive Care Medicine published the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM) practical guidelines for respiratory support in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).

This monumental work involved 70 experts who spent two years reviewing, scrutinizing and analyzing an extensive body of documents and articles.

The ARDS Guidelines represent a valuable synthesis of knowledge accumulated over decades.

All the information, suggestions and recommendations were filtered using a rigorous methodology that is considered to be the “gold standard” to guide evidence-based medical practice.

Within this methodology, randomised trials and meta-analyses represent the highest levels of evidence.

It is worth noting however, that while some ESICM recommendations aligned with the statistical analyses of the meta-analyses, others deviated from them.

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