PEEP-Induced Changes of Pulmonary Capillary Wedge Pressure, Prepulmonary and Total Intrathoracic Blood Volume in Anesthetized Dogs

Since the introduction of the flow-directed pulmonary artery catheter by Swan et al [30] the pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (PCWP) has been applied more and more as an indicator of circulating volume status. It has been thought that left atrial pressure (LAP) reflects LV preload. Therefore experimental and clinical evaluations of the pulmonary artery catheter were focussed on comparisons between PCWP and LAP, and it was found that there is an acute correlation between LAP and PCWP during spontaneous breathing (SB) and intermittent positive pressure ventilation (IPPV) [1, 5, 9, 12, 15, 17, 34].