Sanford Levine, Taitan Nguyen, Nyali Taylor, Michael E Friscia, Murat T Budak, Pamela Rothenberg, Jianliang Zhu, Rajeev Sachdeva, Seema Sonnad, Larry R Kaiser, Neal A Rubinstein, Scott K Powers, Joseph B Shrager
BACKGROUND: The combination of complete diaphragm inactivity and mechanical ventilation (for more than 18 hours) elicits disuse atrophy of myofibers in animals. We hypothesized that the same may also occur in the human diaphragm. METHODS: We obtained biopsy specimens from the costal diaphragms of 14 brain-dead organ donors before organ harvest (case subjects) and compared them with intraoperative biopsy specimens from the diaphragms of 8 patients who were undergoing surgery for either benign lesions or localized lung cancer (control subjects)...
March 27, 2008: New England Journal of Medicine