Monitoring Certain Aspects of Respiratory Failure

¹ Mayo Clinic and Mayo Foundation: Section of Medicine
² Mayo Graduate School of Medicine (University of Minnesota), Rochester: Resident in Medicine

Acute respiratory failure has become a recognized medical emergency. There is increasing awareness that monitoring by the Astrup technique does not provide enough information in respiratory failure. Repeated analyses of arterial blood gases have the added advantage of determining whether oxygenation is adequate. This paper presents ten illustrative cases of respiratory failure in which both Astrup and arterial blood-gas determinations were made. The arterial blood-gas measurements provided information that was not obtained from the Astrup measurements and influenced the clinical course in the hospital. Patients with primary alveolar hypoventilation, alveolar hypoventilation related to obesity, physiologic shunting, and alveolarcapillary block patterns must be monitored by determination of arterial blood-gas tensions.