High-flow oxygen in critical care: Addressing Clinical Challenges and Exploring Future Directions

High flow oxygen (HFO) is a relatively new regimen to provide respiratory support in critically ill patients. In the years preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, HFO was introduced into adult critical care because it filled a gap between conventional oxygen therapy (COT) and positive-pressure ventilation. Its adoption, however, in absence of rigorous investigation of underlying mechanisms, has left clinicians confronting with daily
challenges encountered in managing critically ill patients with respiratory failure. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, clinical use of HFO has further increased, despite important knowledge on physiological mechanisms and clinical outcome was still lacking. The challenges hereby caused were the main driver of going ‘back to basics’ in the studies presented in this thesis.