Yoshiaki Inoue, Tadahiko Shiozaki, Osamu Tasaki, Toshiaki Hayakata, Hitoshi Ikegawa, Kazuhisa Yoshiya, Toshiyuki Fujinaka, Hiroshi Tanaka, Takeshi Shimazu, Hisashi Sugimoto
We studied cerebral blood flow (CBF) in the transition from the acute to the chronic phase of severe head injury in order to determine patterns of change in relation to neurological outcome. We measured CBF with stable xenon-enhanced computed tomography (Xe-CT) in 20 consecutive patients at 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 weeks after severe head injury, and analyzed the relation between the pattern of change in CBF and neurological outcome at 6 months after injury. CBF values were significantly lower in the brain-injured patients than in 14 healthy volunteers, except at 3 weeks after injury, when CBF increased in the patients to a value that did not differ significantly from that in the normal volunteers...
December 2005: Journal of Neurotrauma