Brain death diagnosis in misleading conditions (original) (raw)

1999, QJM : monthly journal of the Association of Physicians

The necessity of defining brain death (BD) arose from technological development in medical science. The definition of this concept had practical consequences and opened the way to organ donation from BD patients. Nowadays, the imbalance between the number of organs available for transplantation and the size of the demand is becoming critical. In most laboratories, a BD diagnosis is made according to precise criteria and in a well-defined process. BD diagnosis should be improved, not only to assure the safety and to preserve the human dignity of the patient, but also in order to increase the rate of organ donation. By analysing some epidemiological parameters in BD diagnosis and organ donation, it appears that BD diagnoses can be made more often and more rapidly if one has a reliable, accurate, and safe confirmatory test, especially under misleading conditions (hypothermia, drugs, metabolic disturbances). In our experience, the use of multimodality evoked potentials (MEPs) to confirm...

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