Cerebral blood flow in the acute phase after head injury. Part 2: Correlation to intraventricular pressure (IVP), cerebral perfusion pressure (CPP), PaCO2, ventricular fluid lactate, lactate/pyruvate ratio and pH.

In 40 comatose patients with severe head injury, cerebral blood flow (CBF) studies were performed with the 133Xenon washout technique over the most severely injured hemisphere. All patients were mildly sedated with diazepam, chlorpromazine and meperidine and subjected to respiratory support. Simultaneously with the CBF study, intraventricular pressure (IVP), systemic arterial pressure (SAP) and ventricular fluid (VF) lactate, pyruvate and pH were measured. The results indicate a positive correlation between CBF and lactate in patients with a good recovery, irrespective of the time after the trauma, and a positive correlation irrespective of outcome, if the measurements were performed more than 3 days after the trauma. In patients with mainly supratentorial lesions without signs of brain-stem lesions, CBF and CPP were positively correlated, while CBF and ICP were negatively correlated (lost autoregulation). In contradistinction, CBF was positively correlated to ICP and PaCO2 in patients with diffuse brain injury. In some cases of repeated dynamic studies, the clinical course seemed to be related to changes in the measured parameters.