Coma and Intensive Care Neurology

  • Daniel F. Hanley
  • Anish Bhardwaj
  • John A. Ulatowski
  • Alex Razumovsky
  • Marek A. Mirski
Chapter

Abstract

Neurocritical care is a subspecialty that has grown during the past 15 years. Critical care is care that is rendered in an acute and emergent setting in which the absence of care is associated with severe disability or death. The critical care concept evolved out of the need to render time-dependent emergent therapies in acute respiratory failure during the polio epidemics and for arrhythmia experienced by heart attack victims. Critical care grew rapidly in the 1970s to provide supportive care for the sickest patients with cardiologic, pulmonologic, and gastrointestinal disorders. In the 1980s the analogous subsets of neurologic and neurosurgical patients began to be identified. Neurocritical Care Units are now populated with head trauma victims, subarachnoid hemorrhage patients, the small numbers of patients who have treatable stroke, and patients with infectious disorders, including meningitis, encephalitis, and the parainfectious diseases, such as Guillain-Barré syndrome and myasthenia gravis. This chapter illustrates the time dependence and therapeutic complexities associated with these patients.

Keywords

Status Epilepticus Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Purpura Domoic Acid Viral Encephalitis Clinical Neurology 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2003

Authors and Affiliations

  • Daniel F. Hanley
  • Anish Bhardwaj
  • John A. Ulatowski
  • Alex Razumovsky
  • Marek A. Mirski

There are no affiliations available

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