How can you tell if PICS is present? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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When someone has survived an intensive care unit stay, they may experience a host of challenges to their wellbeing known collectively as post intensive care syndrome, or PICS. Critical care expert Rohan Mathur at Johns Hopkins says sometimes the worst of it is the manifestations can be hard to detect.

Mathur: All of these can often stay a little bit hidden. The physical ones perhaps not so much but the other ones things like cognitive issues impacting executive function or emotional regulation for mental health issues, having PTSD, anxiety, flashbacks of the times you were sedated or confused. These can take a big toll on people and they can be relatively silent and not something that we always measure after someone leaves, and so even though we might think that we've really successfully taken care of somebody, we saved their life, gotten them through this there can be a lot of impacts on someone's life after they leave the ICU.    :33

Mathur notes that symptoms of PICS may occur in 50-80% of ICU survivors. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.