Summary Focused echocardiography is becoming a widely used tool to aid clinical assessment by anaesthetists and critical care physicians. At the present time, most physicians are not yet trained in focused echocardiography or believe that it may result in adverse outcomes by delaying, or otherwise interfering with, time‐critical patient management. We performed a systematic review of electronic databases on the topic of focused echocardiography in anaesthesia and critical care. We found 18 full text articles, which consistently reported that focused echocardiography may be used to identify or exclude previously unrecognised or suspected cardiac abnormalities, resulting in frequent important changes to patient management. However, most of the articles were observational studies with inherent design flaws. Thirteen prospective studies, including two that measured patient outcome, were supportive of focused echocardiography, whereas five retrospective cohort studies, including three outcome studies, did not support focused echocardiography. There is an urgent requirement for randomised controlled trials.

Our results suggest that type-A aortic dissection patients have hemodynamic responses to exercise that are comparable to other cardiovascular patients. Moreover, we found significant increases in peak oxygen uptake, maximal workload, and quality-of-life after ended ECR.

Background Neurodevelopmental impairments are common in survivors of complex congenital heart defects (CHD). We report neuropsychological and brain imaging assessments in adults operated for isolated septal defects. Methods and Results Patients (mean age 25.6 yrs) who underwent childhood surgery for isolated atrial septal defect (n=34) or ventricular septal defect (n=32), and healthy matched peers (n=40), underwent a standard battery of neuropsychological tests and a 3.0T brain magnetic resonance imaging scan. Patient intelligence was affected with lower scores on Full‐Scale intelligence quotient ( P <0.001), Verbal Comprehension ( P <0.001), Perceptual Reasoning ( P =0.007), and Working Memory ( P <0.001) compared with controls. Also, the CHD group had poorer visuospatial abilities (Immediate Recall, P =0.033; Delayed Recall, P =0.018), verbal memory (Trial 1, P =0.015; Total Learning, P <0.001; Delayed Recall, P =0.007), executive function (Executive Composite Score, P <0.001), and social recognition (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, P =0.002) compared with controls. Self‐reported levels of executive dysfunction, attention deficits and hyperactivity behavior, and social cognition dysfunction were higher in the CHD group compared with population means and controls. We found similar global and regional morphometric brain volumes and a similar frequency of brain magnetic resonance imaging abnormalities in the 2 groups. The CHD group had a high occurrence of psychiatric disease and a larger need for special teaching during school age. Conclusions Children operated for simple CHD demonstrate poorer neurodevelopmental outcomes in adulthood when compared with healthy controls and expected population means. REGISTRATION URL: https://www.clini​caltr​ials.gov . Unique identifier: NCT03871881.

Clinically important respiratory pathology is detectable by lung ultrasound in a substantial number of noncritically ill, pre or postoperative cardiothoracic surgery participants with high estimate of interobserver agreement beyond that expected by chance, and we showed clinically significant diagnoses may be missed by the contemporary practice of clinical examination and CXR.