In this post, my first one for 2021, I was lucky enough to be able to choose between a number of great recent publications. Unable to decide, I ended up including them all in one go. As they all centre around a common theme of ICP and haemodynamics, lumping them together didn’t seem entirely illogical.

In the first paper Andrew Kofke and colleagues provide an excellent overview of the drivers of intracranial hypertension in a number of clinical settings, giving us a “taxonomy” of ICP.

Zeiler et al, in a CENTER-TBI collaboration effort, look at the relationship between patient-specific ICP thresholds and outcome, proffering the question: do individualised ICP-targets based on the evaluation of autoregulatory function offer better outcomes than adhering to traditional guideline-driven thresholds? Read their article here.

In this very useful narrative review, Kan Ma and John Bebawy give us a detailed summary of current evidence on haemodynamic targets in various settings of acute brain injury.

In the last study Okazaki and colleagues share their observational multicenter data on ICP monitoring utilization at the hospital level and functional outcome in severe TBI. Their findings suggest that there is indeed an association between favourable outcomes and the degree to which ICP monitoring is used.