Episode 24 – Mild Traumatic Brain Injury/Concussion

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The Free Open Access Medical Education (FOAM)

We cover the Taming the SRU podcast, “Ketamine Cagematch” (iTunes), a debate between Dr. Minh Le Cong and Dr. Chris Zammit.

Dogma persists that ketamine may increase intracranial pressure, which would be bad in traumatic brain injury (TBI) given the fixed space in the cranial vault.  These are largely from Yet, these patients often need sedation, for agitation or intubation, and drops in blood pressure are also deleterious (see EMCrit on neuroprotective intubation).

PRO (Le Cong): The literature doesn’t show clinically significant deleterious outcomes from ketamine use in the head injured patient.  Review in Annals on ketamine and ICP.  Deleterious effects of apnea may result from other sedative agents.

CON (Zammit): Studies showing that ketamine does not increase ICP confounded by the presence of other sedatives on board.  As…