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

Continuous electroencephalography in the medico-surgical intensive care setting in Brazil: initial experience after 4 months of implementation

Introduction

The objective of this study was to analyze the prevalence, risk factors and impact on outcome of electrographic seizures (ESz), nonconvulsive status epilepticus (NCSE), and periodic epileptiform discharges (PEDs) in critically ill patients admitted to two mixed medico-surgical ICUs.

Methods

This was a retrospective study of 58 consecutive ICU patients (mean age 68 ± 23 years old; 50% women) who underwent continuous electroencephalography (cEEG) monitoring for altered mental status. Outcome was assessed as hospital mortality.

Results

Sixteen patients (28%) were admitted with a primary neurological diagnosis. Mean duration of cEEG was 12 ± 17 hours. Thirty-four patients (59%) were comatose and 32 patients were mechanically ventilated (55%) during cEEG monitoring. Seventeen percent (n = 10) had ESz, 10% (n = 6) had NCSE, 19% (n = 11) had periodic lateralized epileptiform discharges and 26% (n = 15) had epileptiform discharges.

Conclusions

In a mixed population of medical and surgical patients, ESz and NCSE are frequent and associated with increased hospital mortality.

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

Kurtz, P., Santos, D., Gomes, P.H. et al. Continuous electroencephalography in the medico-surgical intensive care setting in Brazil: initial experience after 4 months of implementation. Crit Care 15 (Suppl 1), P333 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1186/cc9753

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/cc9753

Keywords