How to Measure the Glasgow Coma Scale

Cheerio, laddie! Bidding farewell to the Glasgow Coma Scale.

It is time to abandon the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS). As discussed below, this ubiquitous neurologic scoring system is confusing, unreliable, and unnecessarily complex, and its manner of common clinical use is statistically unsound. Teasdale and Jennett devised the GCS in 1974 not for acute care, but rather for the “repeated bedside assessment” in a neurosurgical unit to detect “changing states” ...

Head injury: from the Glasgow Coma Scale to quo vadis.

Background Work in the 1940s and 1950s revealed that the brainstem was key to consciousness. The experimental definition of the reticular activating system by Moruzzi and Magoun28 in 1949 was followed by various confirmatory clinical studies.15,38 Studies conducted during World War II and later demonstrated that rotational head injury was more effective than translational acceleration/decelerat...

The Prognostic Value of Admission Glasgow Coma Scale and AVPU in Acute Drug Poisoning Patients

Glasgow Coma Scale Scoring is Often Inaccurate.

INTRODUCTION The Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) is widely applied in the emergency setting; it is used to guide trauma triage and for the application of essential interventions such as endotracheal intubation. However, inter-rater reliability of GCS scoring has been shown to be low for inexperienced users, especially for the motor component. Concerns regarding the accuracy and validity of GCS scoring...

Path dependence and the persistence of the Glasgow Coma Scale.