Articles: traumatic-brain-injuries.
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Review
The Critical Role of Spreading Depolarizations in Early Brain Injury: Consensus and Contention.
When a patient arrives in the emergency department following a stroke, a traumatic brain injury, or sudden cardiac arrest, there is no therapeutic drug available to help protect their jeopardized neurons. One crucial reason is that we have not identified the molecular mechanisms leading to electrical failure, neuronal swelling, and blood vessel constriction in newly injured gray matter. All three result from a process termed spreading depolarization (SD). Because we only partially understand SD, we lack molecular targets and biomarkers to help neurons survive after losing their blood flow and then undergoing recurrent SD. ⋯ Finally, we summarize points of consensus and contention among the authors as well as where SD research may be heading. In an accompanying review, we critique the role of the glutamate excitotoxicity theory, how it has shaped SD research, and its questionable importance to the study of early brain injury as compared with SD theory.
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Multicenter Study
Modeling Brain-Heart Crosstalk Information in Patients with Traumatic Brain Injury.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an extremely heterogeneous and complex pathology that requires the integration of different physiological measurements for the optimal understanding and clinical management of patients. Information derived from intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring can be coupled with information obtained from heart rate (HR) monitoring to assess the interplay between brain and heart. The goal of our study is to investigate events of simultaneous increases in HR and ICP and their relationship with patient mortality.. ⋯ The presence of a negative relationship between mortality and brain-heart crosstalks indicators suggests that a healthy brain-cardiovascular interaction plays a role in TBI.
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Intensive care medicine · Jun 2022
ReviewManagement of moderate to severe traumatic brain injury: an update for the intensivist.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) remains one of the most fatal and debilitating conditions in the world. Current clinical management in severe TBI patients is mainly concerned with reducing secondary insults and optimizing the balance between substrate delivery and consumption. Over the past decades, multimodality monitoring has become more widely available, and clinical management protocols have been published that recommend potential interventions to correct pathophysiological derangements. ⋯ Even while most of the recovery occurs in the first months after TBI, substantial changes may still occur in a later phase. Neuroprognostication is challenging in these patients, where a risk of self-fulfilling prophecies is a matter of concern. The present article provides a comprehensive and practical review of the current best practice in clinical management and long-term outcomes of moderate to severe TBI in adult patients admitted to the intensive care unit.
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When evaluating children with mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBIs) and intracranial injuries (ICIs), neurosurgeons intuitively consider injury size. However, the extent to which such measures (eg, hematoma size) improve risk prediction compared with the kids intracranial injury decision support tool for traumatic brain injury (KIIDS-TBI) model, which only includes the presence/absence of imaging findings, remains unknown. ⋯ Although measures of ICI size have clear intuitive value, the tradeoff between higher specificity and lower sensitivity does not support the addition of such information to the KIIDS-TBI model.
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Meta Analysis
Post Traumatic Amnesia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Proposal for a New Severity Classification.
Posttraumatic amnesia (PTA) duration is used to predict outcome after traumatic brain injury (TBI): however, no meta-analysis exists. ⋯ PTA duration was reliable in predicting outcome when <7 days, and especially when >42 days but was often unreliable between 7 and 42 days duration.