Articles: neurocritical-care.
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Observational Study
Prognosis Predictions by Families, Physicians, and Nurses of Patients with Severe Acute Brain Injury: Agreement and Accuracy.
Effective shared decision-making relies on some degree of alignment between families and the medical team regarding a patient's likelihood of recovery. Patients with severe acute brain injury (SABI) are often unable to participate in decisions, and therefore family members make decisions on their behalf. The goal of this study was to evaluate agreement between prognostic predictions by families, physicians, and nurses of patients with SABI regarding their likelihood of regaining independence and to measure each group's prediction accuracy. ⋯ For patients with SABI, agreement in predictions between families, physicians, and nurses regarding likelihood of recovery is poor. Accuracy appears higher for physicians and nurses compared with families, with no significant difference between physicians and nurses.
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Pregabalin (PGB) is an effective adjunctive treatment for focal epilepsy and acts by binding to the alpha2-delta subunit of voltage-gated calcium channels to reduce excitatory neurotransmitter release. Limited data exist on its use in the neurocritical care setting, including cyclic seizures-a pattern of recurrent seizures occurring at nearly regular intervals. Although the mechanism underpinning cyclic seizures remains elusive, spreading excitation linked to spreading depolarizations may play a role in seizure recurrence and periodicity. PGB has been shown to increase spreading depolarization threshold; hence, we hypothesized that the magnitude of antiseizure effect from PGB is more pronounced in patients with cyclic versus noncyclic seizures in a critically ill cohort with recurrent seizures. ⋯ PGB was associated with a relative reduction in seizure burden in neurocritically ill patients with recurrent seizures, especially those with cyclic seizures, and may be considered in the therapeutic arsenal for refractory seizures. Whether this effect is mediated via modulation of spreading depolarization requires further study.
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Dysfunctional cerebral autoregulation often precedes delayed cerebral ischemia (DCI). Currently, there are no data-driven techniques that leverage this information to predict DCI in real time. Our hypothesis is that information using continuous updated analyses of multimodal neuromonitoring and cerebral autoregulation can be deployed to predict DCI. ⋯ A TTSAM algorithm using multimodal neuromonitoring and cerebral autoregulation calculations shows promise to classify DCI in real time.
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Predictions of functional outcome in neurocritical care (NCC) patients impact care decisions. This study compared the predictive values (PVs) of good and poor functional outcome among health care providers with and without NCC training. ⋯ Neurointensivists expected better outcomes than other providers and were better at predicting poor functional outcomes. The PV of a good outcome prediction was modest among all providers.