[Study on the clinicopathological correlation in the secondary acute respiratory distress syndrome]

Objective: This study has aimed to study the clinicopathological correlation of patients with secondary acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), specifically having extrapulmonary causes.

Setting: A 22 beds intensive care unit.

Design: An observational study of case series.

Patients: Seventeen patients whose death was caused by acute respiratory distress syndrome were included.

Intervention: A systematic histopathological study was made of all the pulmonary lobes of patients who died in our ICU with the clinical diagnosis of secondary ARDS, who had undergone an autopsy between 1999 and 2009. The Kappa analysis was used to analyze the grade of correlation between the clinical and the pathological diagnosis.

Results: The autopsy confirmed to cases of false positive in 17 patients with ARDS (11%). The kappa value was 0.77, so that the concordance analysis was considered to be satisfactory.

Conclusions: The clinical criteria for ARDS correlate well with acute alveolar damage (AAD) in the autopsy study in patients with secondary ARDS, although some false positive cases can be observed.