Skip to main content
  • Poster presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

Effect of moderate hyperventilation and induced hypertension on cerebral tissue oxygen saturation in comatose post-cardiac arrest patients treated with hypothermia

Introduction

Maintenance of adequate brain perfusion is an essential component of post-resuscitation care. Mean arterial pressure (MAP) and PaCO2 are important determinants of brain perfusion; however, no precise guidelines exist for optimal MAP and PaCO2 targets in comatose post-cardiac arrest (CA) patients.

Methods

Using NIRS, we examined changes in non-invasive cerebral tissue oxygen saturation (SctO2) following moderate hyperventilation (HV) and induced hypertension (IH) in comatose CA patients treated with therapeutic hypothermia (TH). A prospective pilot study including comatose patients successfully resuscitated from out-of-hospital CA treated with TH (33°C for 24 hours, using cold saline and surface cooling device), monitored for continuous SctO2 with the Foresight NIRS system (CAS Medical Systems, Branford, CT, USA). Moderate hyperventilation was induced for approximately 30 minutes by decreasing PaCO2 from ~40 to ~30 mmHg, at stable MAP. After PaCO2 normalization, MAP was increased from ~70 to ~90 mmHg by intravenous infusion of norepinephrine, at stable PaCO2. Effects of MV and IH on SctO2 were analyzed with a paired t test.

Results

Ten patients (mean age, 69.5; mean time to ROSC, 19 minutes) were studied during the stable TH maintenance phase. Results are summarized in Figure 1. MV was associated with a significant reduction of SctO2 from baseline (75% (73 to 76) to 69% (67.5 to 71.5), P < 0.001).

No significant changes in SctO2 were found after IH (74 (72 to 76) vs. 75 (73 to 75.5), P = 0.24).

Conclusion

Moderate HV was associated with significant reduction in cerebral saturation, whilst IH may be detrimental after CA and TH, whilst increasing MAP to supranormal levels with vasopressors does not improve cerebral oxygenation. These data stress the importance of strict control of PaCO2 following CA and TH to avoid secondary cerebral ischemic insults.

Figure 1
figure 1

Changes in SctO 2 after moderate HV and IH tests ( n = 10 patients).

Acknowledgements

MO is supported by Grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation (FN 320030_138191) and The European Critical Care Research Network (ECCRN).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Suys, T., Sala, N. & Oddo, M. Effect of moderate hyperventilation and induced hypertension on cerebral tissue oxygen saturation in comatose post-cardiac arrest patients treated with hypothermia. Crit Care 17 (Suppl 2), P311 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/cc12249

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/cc12249

Keywords