Clinical management and functional neuromonitoring in traumatic brain injury in children

Abstract

Traumatic brain injury is the main cause of childhood disability and death. In this review, we highlight recent original findings and emerging themes from published literature on children with serious traumatic brain injury. We focus this review on lessons learned from our recent randomized clinical trial of hypothermia therapy in severe traumatic brain injury in children and on bedside neuromonitoring. We propose that integrating the measurement of biomarkers into clinical care as surrogate endpoints and as potential prognostic markers would allow us to evaluate earlier the effect of injury and clinical care in children after traumatic brain injury. Several methods are now more readily available to monitor cerebral physiology in children. These methods include indices evaluating the integrity of cerebral autoregulation, such as the pressure reactivity index derived from values obtained from intracranial pressure measurements, flow velocity measurements from transcranial Doppler ultrasonography or from cerebral oximetry. Other methods allow the evaluation of coma with the nonlinear analysis of electroencephalography or the evaluation of cerebral metabolism and cell death pathways with biomarkers from serum, cerebral spinal fluid, and cerebral microdialysis. We suggest expanding clinical functional neuromonitoring to help clinicians understand the burden of exposure to physiological variables and response to therapies during intensive care in order to enhance the management of critically ill children with traumatic brain injury.