Beyond the Brain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2020
It has long been recognised that a neurological injury can elicit profound systemic complications, from Harvey Cushing who in 1903 described strategies to limit fatal haemodynamic dysfunction during surgical CNS surgery to reports of pulmonary oedema post-seizures in 1908.1
Studies of patients admitted to intensive care with traumatic brain injury (TBI) showed that up to 89% developed non-neurological organ dysfunction, worsening their outcome.2,3 Most commonly patients develop sepsis, respiratory or cardiovascular complications with rates of 75%, 41% and 44% respectively in one cohort.3 Renal and hepatic system involvement is much less common.4 The presence of hypotension, severe respiratory failure or sepsis has been shown to be independent predictors of death and mortality rates rise from 31%–40% for single organ failure to 47%–91% with two organ system failures and up to 100% in cases with three or more organ system failures.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.