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(Stroke. 2001;32:2500.)
© 2001 American Heart Association, Inc.

Original Contributions

Multimodal Online Monitoring in Middle Cerebral Artery Territory Stroke

Thorsten Steiner, MD; Jochen Pilz; Peter Schellinger, MD; Rainer Wirtz, MD; Vera Friederichs; Alfred Aschoff, MD Werner Hacke, MD

From the Departments of Neurology (T.S., J.P., P.S., W.H.) and Neurosurgery (R.W., A.A.), Institute for Applied Mathematics (V.F.), University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany..

Correspondence to Dr Thorsten Steiner, Department of Neurology, University of Heidelberg, Im Neuenheimer Feld 400, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany. E-mail thorsten_steiner{at}med.uni-heidelberg.de

Background and Purpose— Patients with large middle cerebral artery infarction and elevated intracranial pressure (ICP) who are undergoing invasive intensive care therapy require technical monitoring. However, the effectiveness of the current gold standard, measurement of ICP, is limited. Furthermore, the effects of what is considered to be standard antiedema medical treatment are not fully understood. We studied whether multimodal monitoring can help to overcome this problem.

Methods— ICP, cerebral perfusion pressure (CPP), and partial brain tissue oxygen pressure (PbrO₂) were continuously measured within the white matter of the frontal lobe unilaterally or bilaterally. We analyzed the effects of antiedema drugs and looked for pattern changes in the PbrO₂ before transtentorial herniation in patients in whom this could not be prevented. Furthermore, complications were registered.

Results— We performed 27 measurements in 21 patients. A total of 297 antiedema drug administrations were analyzed in 11 patients. Hyper-HAES and mannitol were most often associated with an increase in CPP and PbrO₂, whereas the use of thiopental and tromethamine led to negative or contrary effects, although ICP was decreased in every case. Pattern changes in the PbrO₂ curve could be observed between 6 to 18 hours before transtentorial herniation. No bleeding complication or infections were observed.

Conclusions— Multimodal monitoring can be used to monitor antiedema drug effects. Our data suggest that with multimodal monitoring, pathophysiological changes could be predicted considerably in advance. ICP alone is of questionable use. Furthermore, this method might help to optimize the timing of invasive therapy in space-occupying infarction.

Key Words: brain edema • intracranial pressure • monitoring, physiologic • oxygen • partial pressure • stroke

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