Recovery of brain function after cardiac arrest, case report and review.

Cerebral hypoxia during cardiac arrest is the leading cause of mortality and morbidity in survival victims. To reduce cerebral damage, studies focus on finding effective treatments during the resuscitation period. Our report focuses on a 36-year-old police officer who had had two cardiac arrests (one at home and one at the hospital). After acute treatment, his cardiac and brain functions recovered impressively. Neuropsychological results were normal except for mild anomia. He also reported some retrograde memory loss. Surprisingly, he also reported an improvement in a very specific capacity, his episodic memory. We here review the possible causes and mechanisms that may have affected his memory abilities.

The correlation of antepartum upper extremity cuff algometry with epidural analgesic requirements for labor.

BACKGROUND: Individual parturients experience pain differently, and it is unknown how these differences affect their requirements for labor analgesics. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Cuff algometry of the upper limb was used to determine the pain thresholds and temporal summation of pain scores in nulliparous women about to undergo induction of labor. Analgesia was provided, upon request, with a patient controlled epidural analgesia infusion of bupivacaine and fentanyl. Nurse-administered epidural boluses of bupivacaine or lidocaine were given for breakthrough pain. Partial Spearman correlations were used to correlate the cuff algometry measurements with the amount of analgesic medication required by the patient. RESULTS: There was no significant correlation between any of the algometry measurements and the number of patient or nurse administered bupivacaine boluses. There was a correlation of 0.7 (P = 0.001) between the temporal summation scores and the hourly number of nurse-administered epidural lidocaine boluses; however, this was based on only 3 patients who required lidocaine boluses. CONCLUSIONS: The use of pre-labor cuff algometry of the upper limb does not correlate with the patient epidural analgesic requirements and subsequent analgesia administration.