MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jared Radbel MD Staten Island, New York Medical Research: What are the main findings of the study? Dr. Radbel: Using ICD 9 coding from the largest all-payer inpatient health care database in the United States, the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) database we identified 174,180 patients with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) from 1996-2011.  When expanded to estimate country-wide discharges, our data represents 856,293 patients.  We found a decrease in case fatality rate from 46.8% in 1996 to 32.2% in 2011. This corresponds to an absolute mortality reduction of 14.6% and relative reduction of 31%. (more…)