Critical Care Physician
Detecting non-clinical seizures, ischemia and changes in brain function prior to clinical manifestations
When a comatose, critically ill patient arrives in the ICU vital signs are monitored to provide you and your nurses with real-time information about cardiopulmonary physiology. The brain is a vital organ and is obviously dysfunctional in cases in the ICU but continuous cerebral monitoring has been unavailable to the ICU until recently. It is difficult to examine the neurologic status of comatose, or heavily sedated patients. Few examinations are available that reliably assess the patient status of worsening brain injury. Neurologic status is often only assessed once or twice daily even in the neuroscience ICUs. The question is....is that enough?
Neurotelemetry: The Future of Brain Monitoring
"Continuous EEG Monitoring in the ICU: Future Directions,"
by Daniel Friedman, MD, Jan Claassen, MD , and Lawerence Hirsch, MD. (ANESTHESIA & ANALGESIA, Vol. 109, No. 2, August 2009)
The Answer is cEEG monitoring.
Continuous EEG can be used to monitor brain injury and detect potentially harmful seizures in comatose critically ill patients. cEEG has been effective at detecting ischemia and changes in brain function prior to clinical manifestations.
Several studies using cEEG show that the seizure rate may be underestimated in patients with intracerebral hemorrhage and ischemic stroke. If you are not monitoring your neurocritical care patients continuously because of limited resources or lack of experienced R.EEG technologists to work in conjunction with your neurophysiologist we are available and we are on-call 24/7. And, if you do not have a neurophysiologist experienced in critical care cEEG or reading pediatric/newborn cEEGs, we have experience physicians available to work with your local staff to implement an effective program to benefit your patients immediately.