The American journal of emergency medicine
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Multicenter Study Observational Study
Prediction of the neurological outcomes post-cardiac arrest: A prospective validation of the CAST and rCAST.
The neurologic prognosis of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients in whom return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) is achieved remains poor. The aim of this study was to externally and prospectively validate two scoring systems developed by us: the CAST score, a scoring system to predict the neurological prognosis of OHCA patients undergoing targeted temperature management (TTM), and a simplified version of the same score developed for improved ease of use in clinical settings, the revised CAST (rCAST) score. ⋯ rCAST showed high predictive accuracy for the neurological prognosis of OHCA patients managed by TTM, comparable to that of the oCAST score. The scores on the rCAST were strongly correlated with the neurological functions at 90 days, implying that the rCAST is a useful scale for assessing the severity of brain injury after cardiac arrest.
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Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is a rare but serious condition that carries with it a high rate of morbidity and mortality. ⋯ An understanding of GBS can assist emergency clinicians in diagnosing and managing this potentially deadly disease.