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A coma is a deep state of prolonged unconsciousness in which a person cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light, or sound, lacks a normal wake-sleep cycle and does not initiate voluntary actions. The person may experience respiratory and circulatory problems due to the body's inability to maintain normal bodily functions. People in a coma often require extensive medical care to maintain their health and prevent complications such as pneumonia or blood clots. Coma patients exhibit a complete absence of wakefulness and are unable to consciously feel, speak or move. Comas can be derived by natural causes, or can be medically induced.
A head injury is any injury that results in trauma to the skull or brain. The terms traumatic brain injury and head injury are often used interchangeably in the medical literature. Because head injuries cover such a broad scope of injuries, there are many causes—including accidents, falls, physical assault, or traffic accidents—that can cause head injuries.
The Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) is a clinical scale used to reliably measure a person's level of consciousness after a brain injury.
Neurotrauma, brain damage or brain injury (BI) is the destruction or degeneration of brain cells. Brain injuries occur due to a wide range of internal and external factors. In general, brain damage refers to significant, undiscriminating trauma-induced damage.
The AVPU scale is a system by which a health care professional can measure and record a patient's level of consciousness. It is mostly used in emergency medicine protocols, and within first aid.
An induced coma – also known as a medically induced coma (MIC), barbiturate-induced coma, or drug-induced coma – is a temporary coma brought on by a controlled dose of an anesthetic drug, often a barbiturate such as pentobarbital or thiopental. Other intravenous anesthetic drugs such as midazolam or propofol may be used.
Status epilepticus (SE), or status seizure, is a medical condition consisting of a single seizure lasting more than 5 minutes, or 2 or more seizures within a 5-minute period without the person returning to normal between them. Previous definitions used a 30-minute time limit. The seizures can be of the tonic–clonic type, with a regular pattern of contraction and extension of the arms and legs, or of types that do not involve contractions, such as absence seizures or complex partial seizures. Status epilepticus is a life-threatening medical emergency, particularly if treatment is delayed.
There are several scoring systems in intensive care units (ICUs) today.
Pupillometer, also spelled pupilometer, is a medical device intended to measure by reflected light the size of the pupil of the eye. In addition to measuring pupil size, current automated pupillometers may also be able to characterize pupillary light reflex. Some instruments for measuring pupillary distance (PD) are often, but incorrectly, referred to as pupilometers.
Clouding of consciousness, also called brain fog or mental fog, occurs when a person is slightly less wakeful or aware than normal. They are not as aware of time or their surroundings and find it difficult to pay attention. People describe this subjective sensation as their mind being "foggy".
Neurocritical care is a medical field that treats life-threatening diseases of the nervous system and identifies, prevents, and treats secondary brain injury.
A coma scale is a system to assess the severity of coma. There are several such systems:
Post-traumatic amnesia (PTA) is a state of confusion that occurs immediately following a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in which the injured person is disoriented and unable to remember events that occur after the injury. The person may be unable to state their name, where they are, and what time it is. When continuous memory returns, PTA is considered to have resolved. While PTA lasts, new events cannot be stored in the memory. About a third of patients with mild head injury are reported to have "islands of memory", in which the patient can recall only some events. During PTA, the patient's consciousness is "clouded". Because PTA involves confusion in addition to the memory loss typical of amnesia, the term "post-traumatic confusional state" has been proposed as an alternative.
An external ventricular drain (EVD), also known as a ventriculostomy or extraventricular drain, is a device used in neurosurgery to treat hydrocephalus and relieve elevated intracranial pressure when the normal flow of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) inside the brain is obstructed. An EVD is a flexible plastic catheter placed by a neurosurgeon or neurointensivist and managed by intensive care unit (ICU) physicians and nurses. The purpose of external ventricular drainage is to divert fluid from the ventricles of the brain and allow for monitoring of intracranial pressure. An EVD must be placed in a center with full neurosurgical capabilities, because immediate neurosurgical intervention can be needed if a complication of EVD placement, such as bleeding, is encountered.
The National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale, or NIH Stroke Scale (NIHSS), is a tool used by healthcare providers to objectively quantify the impairment caused by a stroke and aid planning post-acute care disposition, though was intended to assess differences in interventions in clinical trials. The NIHSS was designed for the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) Recombinant Tissue Plasminogen Activator (rt-PA) for Acute Stroke Trial and was first published by neurologist Dr. Patrick Lyden and colleagues in 2001. Prior to the NIHSS, during the late 1980s, several stroke-deficit rating scales were in use.
An altered level of consciousness is any measure of arousal other than normal. Level of consciousness (LOC) is a measurement of a person's arousability and responsiveness to stimuli from the environment. A mildly depressed level of consciousness or alertness may be classed as lethargy; someone in this state can be aroused with little difficulty. People who are obtunded have a more depressed level of consciousness and cannot be fully aroused. Those who are not able to be aroused from a sleep-like state are said to be stuporous. Coma is the inability to make any purposeful response. Scales such as the Glasgow coma scale have been designed to measure the level of consciousness.
Simplified motor scales (SMS) refer to a neurological evaluation that is designed to provide a meaningful, objective prognostic evaluation of an individual. SMS have been proposed as alternatives that would improve upon the Glasgow Coma Scale challenges of being confusing, unreliable and unnecessarily complex.
Pain stimulus is a technique used by medical personnel for assessing the consciousness level of a person who is not responding to normal interaction, voice commands or gentle physical stimuli. It forms one part of a number of neurological assessments, including the first aid based AVPU scale and the more medically based Glasgow Coma Scale.
Clinicians routinely check the pupils of critically injured and ill patients to monitor neurological status. However, manual pupil measurements have been shown to be subjective, inaccurate, and not repeatable or consistent. Automated assessment of the pupillary light reflex has emerged as an objective means of measuring pupillary reactivity across a range of neurological diseases, including stroke, traumatic brain injury and edema, tumoral herniation syndromes, and sports or war injuries. Automated pupillometers are used to assess an array of objective pupillary variables including size, constriction velocity, latency, and dilation velocity, which are normalized and standardized to compute an indexed score such as the Neurological Pupil index (NPi).
A pediatric concussion, also known as pediatric mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), is a head trauma that impacts the brain capacity. Concussion can affect functional, emotional, cognitive and physical factors and can occur in people of all ages. Symptoms following after the concussion vary and may include confusion, disorientation, lightheadedness, nausea, vomiting, blurred vision, loss of consciousness (LOC) and environment sensitivity. Concussion symptoms may vary based on the type, severity and location of the head injury. Concussion symptoms in infants, children, and adolescents often appear immediately after the injury, however, some symptoms may arise multiple days following the injury leading to a concussion. The majority of pediatric patients recover from the symptoms within one month following the injury. 10-30% of children and adolescents have a higher risk of a delayed recovery or of experiencing concussion symptoms that are persisting.
References
- 1 2 Wijdicks EF, Bamlet WR, Maramattom BV, Manno EM, McClelland RL (2005). "Validation of a new coma scale: The FOUR score". Annals of Neurology. 58 (4): 585–93. doi:10.1002/ana.20611. PMID 16178024. S2CID 13950317.
- ↑ Wolf CA, Wijdicks EF, Bamlet WR, McClelland RL (2007). "Further validation of the FOUR score coma scale by intensive care nurses". Mayo Clinic Proceedings. 82 (4): 435–438. doi:10.4065/82.4.435. PMID 17418071.
- ↑ Iyer VN, Mandrekar JN, Danielson RD, Zubkov AY, Elmer JL, Wijdicks EF (2009). "Validity of the FOUR score coma scale in the medical intensive care unit". Mayo Clinic Proceedings. 84 (8): 694–701. doi:10.4065/84.8.694. PMC 2719522 . PMID 19648386.
- ↑ Stead LG, Wijdicks EF, Bhagra A, Kashyap R, Bellolio MF, Nash DL, Enduri S, Schears R, William B (2009). "Validation of a new coma scale, the FOUR score, in the emergency department". Neurocritical Care. 10 (1): 50–54. doi:10.1007/s12028-008-9145-0. PMID 18807215. S2CID 25224573.
- ↑ Fischer M, Rüegg S, Czaplinski A, Strohmeier M, Lehmann A, Tschan F, Hunziker PR, Marsch SC (2010). "Inter-rater reliability of the Full Outline of UnResponsiveness score and the Glasgow Coma Scale in critically ill patients: a prospective observational study". Critical Care. 14 (2): R64. doi: 10.1186/cc8963 . PMC 2887186 . PMID 20398274.
- ↑ Khanal K, Bhandari SS, Shrestha N, Acharya SP, Marhatta MN (2016). "Comparison of outcome predictions by the Glasgow coma scale and the Full Outline of UnResponsiveness score in the neurological and neurosurgical patients in the Intensive Care Unit". Indian J Crit Care Med. 20 (8): 473–6. doi: 10.4103/0972-5229.188199 . PMC 4994128 . PMID 27630460.
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