After decades of focusing on the management of respiratory failure, circulatory shock and severe infections that lead to extended stays in hospital intensive care units, critical care researchers are increasingly turning attention to what they believe is a treatable complication developed by many who spend days or weeks confined to an ICU bed: debilitating muscle weakness that can linger long after hospital discharge. In a supplement to the current issue of the journal Critical Care Medicine, an interdisciplinary research group -- from Johns Hopkins and across the world -- propose a new classification scheme for helping physicians to uniformly and precisely identify a variety of muscle-wasting disorders acquired in the ICU, a framework that came out of a meeting of leaders in the field in Brussels, Belgium in March 2009. Dr. Naeem Ali of the division of pulmonary, allergy, critical care and sleep medicine was part of the world-renowned research group who participated in this study.

ScienceDaily:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091027162011.htm

UPI:
http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2009/10/29/Bed-rest-not-what-the-doctor-ordered/UPI-38551256793874/