Hemato-oncology and intensive care medicine: From taboo to indispensable

Abstract

Intensivists are confronted with a broad spectrum of specific clinical problems while caring for critically ill cancer patients. These include defining proper goals of intensive care treatment, managing acute respiratory failure with diverse differential considerations, treating immunologic side-effects of ever new and innovative cancer therapies, as well as numerous clinical scenarios which may exclusively arise in cancer patients. To help clinicians handle such challenges, the initiative Intensive Care in Hematologic and Oncologic Patients (iCHOP) has been dealing with these topics for several years. Supported by several Austrian and German medical societies of intensive care medicine, hematology and oncology, the first “Consensus statement for cancer patients requiring intensive care support” has only recently been released. Acute respiratory failure and its management continues to be a major focus in critically ill cancer patients due to its frequency and its prognostic impact. While noninvasive oxygenation strategies were considered the gold standard of therapy, more recent high-quality data do not show clinical benefits of such techniques including high flow nasal oxygen. On the contrary, several studies revealed an unidentified etiology of an acute respiratory failure as the only potentially modifiable risk factor for adverse outcome. Consequently, evidence-based and rigorously applied diagnostic algorithms are of utmost importance in these patients. Furthermore, intensivists are increasingly confronted with the rising incidence of various and new immunotherapy-associated toxicities and their management.