Fig. 1.

Adrenocortical function parameters from day 7 in ICU until ICU discharge or death—and 7 days after ICU discharge—for patients who did not receive glucocorticoids. a Time courses for the 347 ICU patients, divided into the four cohorts based on the duration of ICU stay, as compared with 20 matched healthy subjects. b Last assessment in ICU and assessment 7 days after ICU discharge for all patients. Data are shown as mean ± SEM on a logarithmic scale. ICU intensive care unit, d day, w week. Circles during ICU stay denote data points for all patients included within each time cohort, triangles denote data points of a decreasing numbers of patients. The horizontal blue-shaded area represents the mean ± SEM of results from the 20 healthy subjects. *P ≤ 0.05 for the comparison with healthy subjects