Neurocritical care
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Cerebral autoregulation plays an important role in safeguarding adequate cerebral perfusion and reducing the risk of secondary brain injury, which is highly important for patients in the neurological intensive care unit (neuro-ICU). Although the consensus white paper suggests that a minimum of 5 min of data are needed for assessing dynamic cerebral autoregulation with transfer function analysis (TFA), it remains unknown if the length of these data is valid for patients in the neuro-ICU, of whom are notably different than the general populations. We aimed to investigate the effect of data length using transcranial Doppler ultrasound combined with invasive blood pressure measurement for the assessment of dynamic cerebral autoregulation in patients in the neuro-ICU. ⋯ Considering the acceptable rates for the data and the variation in the TFA variables (phase shift and gain), we recommend recording data for a minimum length of 7 min for TFA in patients in the neuro-ICU.