BACKGROUND Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has become the most common cause of death and disability in persons between 15 and 30 years of age, and about 10-15% of patients affected by TBI will end up in a coma. Coma caused by TBI presents a significant challenge to neuroscientists. Right median nerve electrical stimulation has been reported as a simple, inexpensive, non-invasive technique to speed...

Assessing behavioral responses to nociception is difficult in severely brain-injured patients recovering from coma. We here propose a new scale developed for assessing nociception in vegetative (VS) and minimally conscious (MCS) coma survivors, the Nociception Coma Scale (NCS), and explore its concurrent validity, inter-rater agreement and sensitivity. Concurrent validity was assessed by analyz...

Since 1974, the Glasgow Coma Scale has provided a practical method for bedside assessment of impairment of conscious level, the clinical hallmark of acute brain injury. The scale was designed to be easy to use in clinical practice in general and specialist units and to replace previous ill-defined and inconsistent methods. 40 years later, the Glasgow Coma Scale has become an integral part of cl...

defining the patient outcome and decision making about allocation of our limited fund and technology for comatose patients depends on our knowledge about frequency and outcome of various coma etiologies. we determined the various coma causes frequency and one-month outcome of non traumatic coma. . in addition the co existence of the primary neurologic signs with the one-month outcome of non tra...

Richard Beard, Drexel University Richard Elder, University of Cincinnati Ernst Gleichman, Heinrich-Heine University, Dusseldorf Colin Lock, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada Peter Sadler, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK Frank Shaw, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Ewen Smith, Strathclyde University, Glascow, UK Martin Stillman, University of Western Ontario, Canada Katherine Tepp...

BACKGROUND Randomized trials of thrombolytic stroke treatment have either excluded patients with posterior circulation ischemia or used inclusion criteria making enrollment of these patients less likely. Consequently, there is less published information on thrombolytic therapy for posterior circulation stroke. OBJECTIVE To determine effective thrombolytic treatment times for posterior circula...