Published in:
01-06-2017 | Focus Editorial
Critical illness: the brain is always in the line of fire
Published in: Intensive Care Medicine | Issue 6/2017
Login to get accessExcerpt
Life-threatening systemic insults or diseases often affect the brain. In critically ill patients, acute brain dysfunction manifests in several ways including reduced consciousness, coma, or delirium. The pathophysiology is complex, incompletely understood, and may relate to critical illness-related inflammatory changes, neurotransmitter imbalances, or failure of adequate energy substrate delivery [1], as well as to the applied treatments, pharmacological neurotoxicity, or the hostile ICU environment (Fig. 1) [2].
Fig. 1
Risk factors and contributors to critical illness-acquired brain dysfunction (blue, red, and yellow boxes), mechanisms of brain injury (red explosions), and long-term neurological sequelae (orange boxes). The arrow indicates the interactions between the multiple interconnected insults and mechanisms that contribute to the development of critical illness-related brain dysfunction, and which are associated with adverse outcome effects including long-term cognitive dysfunction
× ![]()
…