The clinical observation of a turbulent recovery phase in the alcohol abusers among the head injured patients was studied. Various parameters of severity such as duration of hospital stay, length of coma, post-traumatic amnesia, focal neurological deficits, presence of fracture and the behaviour problems during recovery were studied. Behaviour problems and the length of hospital stay were found...

THE CLINICAL PICTURE of hypertensive pontine hemorrhage is felt to be uniform. Coma is of abrupt onset with pupillary miosis, total external ophthalmoplegia, and quadriplegia. Death is the rule and occurs within hours to days. 2 This picture has been somewhat modified since the advent of CT scanning. Case reports have documented "submassive" pontine hemorrhage with partial to complete recovery....

Neural circuits are especially vulnerable to metabolic stress. The locust (Locusta migratoria) responds to anoxia by entering a coma during which neural and muscular systems shut down. During anoxic coma, arrest of the ventilatory central pattern generator is tightly correlated with an abrupt spreading depression (SD)-like increase in extracellular potassium concentration within the metathoraci...

BACKGROUND Coma is a frequent presentation of severe malaria in adults and an important cause of death. The role of cerebral swelling in its pathogenesis, and the possible benefit of intravenous mannitol therapy to treat this, is uncertain. METHODS A computed tomographic (CT) scan of the cerebrum and lumbar puncture with measurement of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pressure were performed on admi...

OBJECTIVE To develop a behavioural assessment based on observations of patients recovering after severe head injury whereby data could be collected by observation and by testing everyday tasks. DESIGN A prospective observational study of a cohort of 88 consecutive hospital admissions with severe head injury. SETTING Two district general hospitals in the UK. PATIENTS Eighty-eight consecuti...

This study aimed to identify white matter (WM) deficits underlying the loss of consciousness in disorder of consciousness (DOC) patients using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) and to demonstrate the potential value of DTI parameters in predicting recovery outcomes of DOC patients. With 30 DOC patients (8 comatose, 8 unresponsive wakefulness syndrome/vegetative state, and 14 minimal conscious stat...

We report on a patient who survived cardiac arrest and showed recovery of consciousness and an injured ARAS at the early stage of hypoxic-ischemic brain injury (HI- BI) for 3 weeks, which was demonstrated by diffusion tensor tractography (DTT).A 52-year-old male patient who had suffered cardiac arrest caused by acute coronary syndrome was resuscitated immediately by a layman and paramedics for ...

Sleep, anesthesia, and coma share a number of neural features but the recovery profiles are radically different. To understand the mechanisms of reversibility of unconsciousness at the network level, we studied the conditions for gradual and abrupt transitions in conscious and anesthetized states. We hypothesized that the conditions for explosive synchronization (ES) in human brain networks wou...

BACKGROUND West Nile Virus (WNV) is a mosquito-borne flavivirus that has caused ongoing seasonal epidemics in the United States since 1999. It is estimated that ≤1% of WNV-infected patients will develop neuroinvasive disease (West Nile encephalitis and/or myelitis) that can result in debilitating morbidities and long-term sequelae. It is essential to collect longitudinal information about the r...