"Acute Vegetative State" und "Persistent Vegetative State": Klinische, biochemische, elektrophysiologische und bildgebende Befunde

Brain perfusion and VEP reactivity in occipital and parietal areas are associated to recovery from hypoxic vegetative state

“…Comparing hypoxic VS patients with patients of other aetiologies, Kotchoubey [7] found that the probability of finding a P300 or N400 is significantly reduced in hypoxic VS patients. Several studies using evoked potentials (SSEP, FAEP) reported that the absence of brain stem potentials or early cortical potentials (N20/P25) in SSEP is a highly significant predictor for a negative prognosis in hypoxic VS [9][10][11][12][13]. This suggests that hypoxic patients do not show cortical activation following stimulation or that such activation is restricted to primary sensory areas, not spreading to higher cortical centres.…”

Guidelines for Quality Management of Apallic Syndrome / Vegetative State

“…The main causes for AS full, remission, defect, and end states can be summarized as the following [2,5,9,18,21,22,26,28,29,36,53,59,77,78,80,91,106,120,164,180,181]:…”

“…Up to now there is no single AS specific laboratory parameter available that can be recommended for diagnosis and/or prognosis [2,14,26,30,31,36,37,50,53,100,138,157].…”

“…At present there is no class I evidence management available for AS or VS. From MEDLINE research over the last decade only a few references could be found on AS but some 640 for VS/PVS. Doctors' inexperience and disagreement with regard to the diagnosis of AS is reflected in the literature [26,36,37,106,[121][122][123][124][125][126][127][128][129]. Therefore, we collected reports on best practice and extensively used the task force members' expertise of AS management as each of them has been in charge of and responsible for AS management in all kinds of specialized rehabilitation institutions for at least 10 years.…”

“…European neurologists, neurosurgeons, neurorehabilitation physicians and physiatrists might keep on using the term apallic syndrome for AS full stage, that can also be an end stage, and for all AS remission stages of partially recovered functioning as well as for the final AS (defect stage). For publications in the English language, the term AS should be connected with VS according to bibliographic databases [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] as for example research in MEDLINE revealed some 640 VS but only few AS references listed for the last decade.…”