Seminars in neurology
-
Seminars in neurology · Oct 2018
ReviewUsing Neuroimaging to Detect Covert Awareness and Determine Prognosis of Comatose Patients: Informing Surrogate Decision Makers of Individual Patient Results.
Robust prognostic indicators of neurological recovery are urgently needed for acutely comatose patients. Functional neuroimaging is a highly sensitive tool for uncovering covert cognition and awareness in behaviorally nonresponsive patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness, and may be applicable to acutely comatose patients. ⋯ Because functional neuroimaging of acutely comatose patients is currently limited to the research context, ethical guidelines for disseminating a patient's individual research results to clinical teams and surrogate decision makers are needed. We propose an ethical framework composed of four conditions that can guide ethical disclosure of individual results of neuroimaging research in the acute care context.
-
Seminars in neurology · Oct 2018
ReviewNeuropalliative Care: A Practical Guide for the Neurologist.
Neuropalliative care is a new and growing field within neurology that focuses on improving the quality of life of patients with serious neurologic illnesses. While specialty-level palliative care training is available to interested neurologists, all neurologists can strive to provide primary palliative care for their patients. In this review, we will describe the scope of neuropalliative care, define patient populations who may benefit from palliative care, and explore the communication and symptom management skills essential to palliative care delivery.
-
Acute neurologic (and potentially disability prone) conditions are rarely taught and, if so, at the bedside and usually after the fact. Simulation training offers a realistic environment to teach rapid-fire decision making, how to take charge, and how best to approach a deteriorating, acutely ill neurologic patient. Simulating acute neurology is a newly emerging educational program. ⋯ Communication skills pertaining to catastrophic neurologic injury with all its ethical ramifications can be taught and practiced. There is a growing need for well-designed, tested teaching scenarios and a need to validate this approach. This review provides an overview of the potential opportunities available in medical institutions with a simulation center.
-
The identification of more effective therapies for brain tumors has been limited in part by the lack of reliable criteria for determining response and progression. Since its introduction in 1990, the MacDonald criteria have been used in neuro-oncology clinical trials to determine response, but they fail to address issues such as pseudoprogression, pseudoresponse, and nonenhancing tumor progression that have arisen with more recent therapies. ⋯ In addition, subgroups have focused on response assessment during immunotherapy and use of positron emission tomography, as well as determination of neurologic function, clinical outcomes assessment, and seizures. The RANO criteria are currently a collective work in progress, and refinements will be needed in the future based on data from clinical trials and improved imaging techniques.
-
Decision making for pregnant women and fetuses who suffer brain injuries is emotionally difficult and conceptually challenging. Occasionally, both the pregnant woman and the fetus have suffered an injury that confers a poor neurological prognosis, and decisions about one of them will have implications for the other-making the process of decision making even more problematic. In this article, decision-making standards and principles are reviewed for both pregnant women and fetuses, using a real case from the author's institution. Practical suggestions are made regarding deliberative processes and consultative models that can help with these difficult cases.