JAMA this week: ventilator-associated pneumonia

Our inaugural JMLA case study focused on an adult patient with ventilator-associated pneumonia -- this week's Journal of the American Medical Association includes two items that provide useful background information for further understanding this condition:

- a patient-level description of VAP (risk factors, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment), and

- an article that analyzes how to most accurately diagnose pneumonia in a mechanically ventilated patient (the study's objective: "To review the published medical literature describing the precision and accuracy of clinical, radiographic, and laboratory data to diagnose bacterial VAP relative to a histological gold standard.")