Prone position has been used in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) patients for more than 40 years in ICU. After having demonstrated its capability to significantly improve oxygenation in a large number of patients, sometimes dramatically, this procedure has been found to prevent ventilatorinduced lung injury, the primary concern for the intensivists managing ARDS patients. Over the time, This strategy has eventually been found efficient to improve patient outcome in selected ARDS patients.In this review, we will go over the rationale and then the evidence of using prone position in ARDS patients.
RationaleThe early reason that prompted clinicians to turn ARDS patient to prone was oxygenation improvement. This effect, sometimes dramatic (1), was observed in the large majority of patients. Therefore from the early onset the clinicians used proning to improve oxygenation. This effect resulted from a reduction in intra-pulmonary shunt. For the intra-pulmonary shunt to go down two possibilities do exist, either more ventilation in well perfused areas or less perfusion in poorly ventilated lung regions. The latter mechanism was considered as true as intuitively it was thought that the change in gravity direction will affect the lung perfusion in the same way, i.e., less perfusion towards dorsal lung regions, now non-dependent, in the prone position. Several experiments found that the dorsal lung regions when in the prone position still had the highest amount of blood flowing through them (2-8). Therefore, this unexpected finding argued against the second mechanism to explain the reduction in intra-pulmonary shunt. Therefore, better ventilation towards well perfused areas accounts for the common scenario to explain better oxygenation in prone (9).With the recognition of ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI) it turned out that prone position was also able to modulate it. Animal studies, like that of Broccard et al. (10), demonstrated that prone position, as compared to supine