Is fever control or improved survival the 'risk factor' for ventilator-associated pneumonia?

[...]this model takes into account only the periods of time during which the patients were exposed to the risk of VAP. [...]the benefit of this model is that the death event is not a confounding factor in the determination of VAP incidence between the patients receiving fever control for longer than 3 days and those who did not. [...]we acknowledge that the matching of the two groups was not optimal in our observational study and obviously a prospective randomized study is required. [...]we would like to emphasize our study was not designed to assess the impact of fever-control strategy on mortality and, despite the apparent results, no conclusion can be drawn on mortality. [...]a recent meta-analysis showed VAP was not associated with over-mortality in medical and trauma patients [7].