... treatment withdrawn (DIS 8 and SA 6), tracheostomy(DIS 2 and SA 0), and study withdrawal (DIS 6 and SA 1).Patients randomly assigned to DIS were more likely to with- draw from the study (P = ... race, severity of illness as measuredby Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II (APACHE II) , and MV reason [18]. Normally distributed dataare reported as mean and 95% confidence interval ... for pain [2]. In both arms of the study, patients could be managed by an SA, but this was notmandated. To our knowledge, no study has directly comparedDIS with SA. We therefore designed a randomized...