Prone ventilation
method of ventilation in which the patient lies face-down
Prone ventilation, sometimes called prone positioning or proning, is a method of mechanical ventilation with the patient lying face-down (prone). It improves oxygenation in most patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and reduces mortality. The earliest trial investigating the benefits of prone ventilation occurred in 1976. Since that time, many meta-analyses and one randomized control trial, the PROSEVA trial, have shown an increase in patients' survival with the more severe versions of ARDS. There are many proposed mechanisms, but they are not fully delineated. The proposed utility of prone ventilation is that this position will improve lung mechanics, improve oxygenation, and increase survival. Although improved oxygenation has been shown in multiple studies, this position change's survival benefit is not as clear. Similar to the slow adoption of low tidal volume ventilation utilized in ARDS, many believe that the investigation into the benefits of prone ventilation will likely be ongoing in the future.
Physiologic effects
The purpose of prone ventilation is to better facilitate lung mechanics to improve ventilation/perfusion ratio mismatches in ARDS.
By redistributing pulmonary blood flow, oxygen levels can increase from low ventilated areas to higher ventilation. The physiologic mechanism can be explained by a gravity-dependent increase in pleural pressure when supine compared to prone. In the prone position, the lungs' dorsal aspects have less pleural pressure, which alleviates forces trying to collapse the alveoli.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7249918. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prone ventilation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.