Studies have showed that long-term sequelae from COVID-19 may affect human respiratory system, cardiovascular system, nervous system, immune system etc. with a negative impact on the patients’ mental health, well-being and quality of life, but the lungs are the organ most likely to sustain serious impairment from COVID-19. The convalescen...

A novel study was published on Current Opinion in Physiology to summarise the impact of COVID-19 infection on pulmonary function and to relate this to disease severity and to the clinico-radiological outcomes. In agreement with the findings of the respiratory community concerning the physiological assessment in patients following COVID-19 inf...

Energy expenditure appears highly variable among critically ill patients and in individual patients during various phases of illness. As a consequence, critically ill patients are at considerable risk of under- or overfeeding during ICU and post-ICU hospital stay, when rough and static estimates are used. The most recent international guidelines...

Different metabolic phases can be distinguished in critical illness, which influences nutritional treatment. Achieving optimal nutritional treatment during these phases in critically ill patients is challenging. The aim of this observational study is to describe measured resting energy expenditure (mREE) and feeding practices and tolerance duri...

Indirect calorimetry (IC)-guided nutrition might positively affect the clinical outcome of critically ill patients. The objective of this study is to assess the benefit of isocaloric nutrition guided by IC, compared to hypocaloric nutrition, for critically ill patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU). This systematic review and meta-a...

COVID-19 can rapidly progress into acute respiratory distress syndrome accompanied by multi-organ failure requiring invasive mechanical ventilation and critical care treatment. Nutritional therapy is a fundamental pillar in the management of hospitalized patients. It is broadly acknowledged that overfeeding and underfeeding of intensive care un...

Long-term effects of COVID-19 are of utmost relevance. This study aims to determine the functional capacity of COVID-19 survivors by cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET), the characteristics associated with cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) performance and the safety and tolerability of CPET. COSMED system (Quark CPET, COSMED, Rome, It...

Among other important risk factors for severe COVID-19 outcomes, obesity has emerged along with undernutrition-malnutrition as a strong predictor of disease risk and severity. Obesity-related excessive body fat may lead to respiratory, metabolic and immune derangements potentially favouring the onset of COVID-19 complications. Early after the o...

Indirect calorimetry (IC) is the gold-standard for determining measured resting energy expenditure (mREE) in critical illness. When IC is not available, predicted resting energy expenditure (pREE) equations are commonly utilized, which often inaccurately predict metabolic demands leading to over- or under-feeding. This study aims to longitudina...

Premature infants often undergo postnatal growth failure and show an altered body composition (BC) at termequivalent age (TEA) with lower fat-free mass (FFM) and increased fat mass (FM) than infants born at term. Early nutrition and growth may impact brain growth. Nevertheless, the evidence relating BC and later neurodevelopment remains sparse....

Critical illness demands objective, targeted nutritional therapy to prevent adverse effects of underfeeding/ over feeding. Thus, all recent societal guidelines recommend indirect calorimetry use to determine energy needs. Current commercially available indirect calorimeters are often inaccurate, and the inconveniences have led to significant ch...

The outbreak of the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection has presented a global public health emergency. Although predominantly a pandemic of acute respiratory disease, corona virus infectious disease-19 (COVID-19) results in multi-organ damage that impairs cardiopulmonary function and reduces cardiorespir...

Body composition is a sensitive marker of infants’ intra- and extrauterine growth quality that can influence short- and long-term outcomes; including retinopathy of prematurity, bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), metabolic health, cardiovascular and neurodevelopmental outcomes. Low body fat percentage at birth in small and appropriate for gestat...

A major driver leading to the lack of emphasis on timely ICU nutrition delivery is lack of objective data to guide nutrition care. If we are to ultimately overcome current fundamental challenges to effective ICU nutrition delivery, we must all adopt routine objective, longitudinal measurement of energy targets via indirect calorimetry (IC). Key...

A task force supported by the European Respiratory Society has recently developed the first evidence-based clinical practice guidelines for the diagnosis of asthma in children aged 5 to 16 years. Nine PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparator and Outcome) questions were used. The task force then developed a diagnostic algorithm based on th...

The current review aims to summarize the complex relationship between SARS-CoV-2 infection and nutritional status and the effects of malnutrition in terms of disease severity, patients’ recovery time, incidence of complications and mortality rate. In COVID-19, this relationship has shown to be crucial across the disease phases, particularly in ...

The cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPET) provides an objective assessment of ventilatory limitation, related to the exercise minute ventilation (VE) coupled to carbon dioxide output (VCO2); high values of VE/VCO2 slope define an exercise ventilatory inefficiency. This prospective study explores the methodology of CPET to evaluate pulmonary dama...

Nutritional and metabolic disturbances are observed in patients critically ill with COVID-19. At each step of the progression of the disease, ICU patients with COVID-19 should be carefully evaluated in terms of malnutrition risk and medical nutritional support. The tremendous challenges posed by the continuous clinical changes requires adequate...

The use of indirect calorimetry (IC) is increasing due to its precision in resting energy expenditure (REE) measurement in critically ill patients. Thus, this study aim to evaluate the clinical outcomes of an IC-guided nutrition therapy compared to predictive equations strategy in such a patient population. This systemic review and meta-analysi...

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread worldwide determining a dramatic impact on the healthcare system. Aim of this study is to evaluate mid-term clinical impact of COVID-19 on respiratory function. The respiratory system is subjected to major involvement during COVID-19 also due to the hyperactive host immune response and the inflam...