ABSTRACT

Since still controversial and not often applied, we would like to share our acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) patient successfully treated with noninvasive mechanical ventilation. A 26 year-old male patient with the diagnosis of Burkitt lymphoma was admitted to our intensive care unit because of neutropenic fever and sepsis-induced ARDS after chemotherapy. Although PO2/FiO2=114.2, we started non-invasive mechanical ventilation since the patient was conscious and cooperative. Non-invasive mechanical ventilation and spontaneous respiration experiments were successfully managed according to the intermittent arterial blood gas results and the need for non-invasive mechanical ventilation was disappeared at the end of 72 hours. Especially in the early phases of ARDS and in selected patients non-invasive mechanical ventilation should be tried before intubation but invasive mechanical ventilation should not be delayed if the patient deteriorates.

Keywords: Acute respiratory distress syndrome, non-invasive ventilation, immunosuppressive patient, acute respiratory failure