The abdominal compartment syndrome

Abstract

At Thanksgiving, a national holiday here in the United States, many millions of turkeys-also called Thanksgiving birds-are tightly stuffed with various sorts of ingredients (mine would include chickpeas, garlic, wine-soaked bread, and thyme) and served to the assembled members of American families. Granted, these large birds are stuffed postmortem, but what would happen if they were tightly stuffed alive? First, the bird would stop flying, and then gradually it would hypoventilate, collapse, and die. Of course, you could attribute the death of your stuffed avis to bad lungs, old heart, and toxins produced by the chickpeas and garlic; as a last resort, you could blame the anesthetist. The reality, though, proven by a large body of first-grade scientific evidence, is much more prosaic: intra-abdominal hypertension (IAHT) secondary to increased intra-abdominal pressure (IAP) caused abdominal compartment syndrome (ACS). © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.