title: Neurological prognostication of outcome in patients in coma after cardiac arrest.
abstract: Management of coma after cardiac arrest has improved during the past decade, allowing an increasing proportion of patients to survive, thus prognostication has become an integral part of post-resuscitation care. Neurologists are increasingly confronted with raised expectations of next of kin and the necessity to provide early predictions of long-term prognosis. During the past decade, as technology and clinical evidence have evolved, post-cardiac arrest prognostication has moved towards a multimodal paradigm combining clinical examination with additional methods, consisting of electrophysiology, blood biomarkers, and brain imaging, to optimise prognostic accuracy. Prognostication should never be based on a single indicator; although some variables have very low false positive rates for poor outcome, multimodal assessment provides resassurance about the reliability of a prognostic estimate by offering concordant evidence.
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. Electronic address: andrea.rossetti@chuv.ch.
authors.forename: Andrea O
authors.initials: AO
authors.lastname: Rossetti
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA.
authors.forename: Alejandro A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Rabinstein
authors.affiliation: Department of Intensive Care Medicine, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Mauro
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Oddo
mesh_terms: D003128:Coma / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000209:etiology / Q000378:metabolism / Q000503:physiopathology; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods*; D006323:Heart Arrest / Q000150:complications*; D006801:Humans; D059906:Neuroimaging / Q000379:methods*; D009460:Neurologic Examination / Q000379:methods*