Der Nervenarzt
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The translation of modern principles of sedation and weaning from mechanical ventilation from general intensive care to neurocritical care has to take into account specific aspects of brain-injured patients. These include interactions with intracranial hypertension, disturbed autoregulation, a higher frequency of seizures and an increased risk of delirium. The advantages of sedation protocols, scoring tools to steer sedation and analgesia and an individualized choice of drugs with emphasis on analgesia gain more interest and importance in neurocritical care as well, but have not been thoroughly investigated so far. When weaning neurological intensive care unit (ICU) patients from the ventilator and approaching extubation it has to be acknowledged that conventional ICU criteria for weaning and extubation can only have an orienting character and that dysphagia is much more frequent in these patients.
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The term non-convulsive status epilepticus (NCSE) refers to a heterogeneous group of diseases with different etiology, prognosis and treatment. The different forms of NCSE comprise about 25-50% of all status epilepticus cases. The most frequent form encountered in clinical practice is complex-partial SE but the rarer conditions of absence status, aura status and subtle SE are also included under this category. ⋯ The third treatment step is general anesthesia if NCSE fails to be controlled. The aggressiveness of the applied therapy depends on the severity of the NCSE and the general condition of the patient. The prognosis is determined by the subtype of NCSE and the underlying etiology.
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Delayed cerebral ischemia (DCI) is the second most important impacting factor for functional outcome after aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) following the initial severity of the bleeding. In contrast to the initial SAH severity the presence and consequences of DCI can be managed with prophylactic and therapeutic interventions. The previous notion of treatment of angiographically observed vasospasm has not been shown to be successful. This article covers prevention, monitoring and therapeutic concepts for patients with SAH with emphasis on the efficacy for DCI and current and ongoing research projects.
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Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is the most devastating form of stroke. It affects approximately 2 million people worldwide every year and is a major cause of mortality and morbidity. ⋯ Advances in knowledge on the underlying pathomechanisms of ICH and the clinical impact have contributed to the development of novel treatment approaches. Currently, surgical treatment, aggressive blood pressure management and intraventricular fibrinolysis in patients with additional severe intraventricular hemorrhage are being investigated in large scale phase III clinical trials.