On the difficulty of Traumatic brain injured patients end-of-life decisions

Traumatic brain injury occurs abruptly, involves multiple specialized teams, solicits the health care system in its emergency dimension and engages the well being of the patient and his relatives for a life time period. Clinicians are faced with issues of uppermost importance: medical issues such as predicting long term neurological outcome of the comatose patient, ethical issues because of the influence of intensive care on the long term survival of patients in vegetative and minimally conscious state, legal issues as the consequence of the current law which has set a new concept of proportionality of care, social issues as the result of the very high cost of these pathologies. This review will focus on the brain explorations that are required such as CT scan, evoked potentials, electroencephalography, magnetic resonance imaging and magnetic resonance spectroscopy to provide to the clinician a multimodal assessment of the brain state to predict outcome of coma. Such assessment is mandatory to answer the crucial question of proportionality of care in these patients. However, these techniques need further validation on large series of patients before being useful on clinical practice. (c) 2007 Elsevier Masson SAS. Tous droits reserves.