The anesthesia and intensive care in infants and children have assumed positions of primary importance in contemporary medicine. In these delicate sectors of medicine, clinical research activities must be continually supported by interdisciplinary collaborations. Neonatal and pediatric intensive care requires that all involved physicians, including the surgeon and anesthesiologist, be willing to work together as a team. However, coordination of the various pathophysiological and clinical aspects of neonatal and pediatric critical medicine is highly complex. A complete and current review of the anaethesia and intensive care of infants and children must include discussions of morbidity rates, so as to guide the clincians in choosing the diagnostic approach, as well as of monotoring techniques appropriate to support the therapeutic decision. Recent progress in intensive care medicine for infants and children has been significant.

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Perioperative Management.- 1 Preoperative evaluation.- 2 Clinical approach, monitoring and decision making in paediatric intensive care.- 3 The choice of paediatric anaesthesia system.- 4 Update on inhalation anaesthesia.- 5 Choice of perioperative fluids and transfusion.- 6 Outpatient surgery in paediatric patients.- 7 Locoregional anaesthesia in paediatrics.- 8 Complications of regional analgesia in paediatric anaesthesia.- 9 Anaesthesia and postoperative care of children and neonates undergoing cardiac surgery, including transplantation.- 10 New modes of ventilation in paediatrics.- 11 Weaning from artificial ventilation.- Mother and Child.- 12 Fetal anaesthesia for surgery.- 13 Effects of anaesthesia/analgesia techniques in mother and child.- 14 Maternal complications.- 15 Asphyxia and hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy in neonates: postnatal interventions.- 16 The parents in neonatal intensive care units and the kangaroo-mother method.- Perioperative Sedation and Analgesia.- 17 Models of pharmacokinetics in the treatment of acute postoperative pain in paediatrics.- 18 Techniques of continuous or intermittent analgesia.- 19 Sedation and acute pain management: association/combinations of drugs.- 20 Sedation and the paediatric patient.- 21 Immediate postoperative considerations.- Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU).- 22 Update on respiratory distress syndrome.- 23 High frequency ventilation.- 24 Surfactant in respiratory distress syndrome.- 25 Liquid ventilation: recent concepts.- 26 Hemopurification in paediatric intensive care.- 27 Early diagnosis and treatment of life-threatening bacterial infections in neonates and critically ill children.- 28 Clinicalseverity scores in neonates.- 29 Epidemiology and management of sepsis in neonates.- Main symbols.