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Seizures are common in children (\~350 per 100,000 patients per year) and require immediate medical attention. If the seizure is prolonged (\> 5 minutes) it is called status epilepticus and delayed treatment leads to higher risk in drug resistance and brain injury. The current standard of care for children admitted to the ICU with established or suspected status epilepticus is to start a conventional continuous EEG study that helps diagnosing seizures by typical electro graphic patterns. It takes on average 4 hours to start and another two hours to obtain a reading by epileptologists. This is far beyond the time window of starting an EEG study (60 minutes) as recommended by the neurocritical care society. In adult ICUs, point of care "Rapid Response EEG" are becoming a new standard of care and our ICU adopted this practice in 2020. It can be easily placed by the ICU staff rather than a specifically trained EEG technician but has a lower resolution due to fewer leads (10 vs. 20). The purpose of this study is to determine wether and by how much time RR-EEG yields faster preliminary EEG reports that the previously available conventional EEG (cEEG) and wether the detection of electro graphic seizures is comparable. This is a retrospective cohort study following patients who are admitted to the PICU and are placed on either cEEG or RR-EEG for status epilepticus.
Brain injury is the main cause of death and disability for patients surviving cardiac arrest resuscitation and seizures are diagnosed in up to a third of these patients. The investigators are proposing a pilot randomized placebo-controlled clinical trial to evaluate the safety and feasibility of perampanel use for post-cardiac arrest status epilepticus (PCARSE) prevention after cardiac arrest.
This is a stepped-wedge cluster randomized effectiveness-implementation hybrid study aimed at determining the effect of dissemination of a QI bundle on the time to treatment of SE among hospitalized, non-critically ill children. The primary study endpoint is to decrease the time from the SE diagnosis to treatment with the first dose of a benzodiazepine (BZD) as measured during hospitalization, which will decrease chances of morbidity and mortality.
RESTORE is a randomized clinical trial investigating the safety and feasibility of using EEG treatment targets (burst suppression vs. seizure suppression) for post-cardiac arrest refractory status epilepticus treatment.
In this study, the investigators propose Pulsed Low-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (PLIFU) stimulation of brain regions that modulate (thalamus) or generate focal motor seizures (primary motor cortex), with the goal of ameliorating seizure activity in subjects in non-convulsive or focal motor status epilepticus. The course of treatment will consist of an initial 10 minute PLIFU treatment session with an option for a 2nd session if necessary. The primary objective of this study is to determine whether PLIFU reduces or suppresses epileptic activity in patients with Non-Convulsive Status Epilepticus (NCSE)/Focal Motor Status Epilepticus (FMSE) that have not responded to standard of care.
In the United States, the current standard of prehospital (i.e. outside of hospitals) emergency care for children with life-threatening illnesses in the community includes remote physician support for paramedics providing life-saving therapy while transporting the child to the hospital. Most prehospital emergency medical services (EMS) agencies use radio-based (audio only) communication between paramedics and physicians to augment this care. However, this communication strategy is inherently limited as the remote physician cannot visualize the patient for accurate assessment and to direct treatment. The purpose of this pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) is to evaluate whether use of a 2-way audiovisual connection with a pediatric emergency medicine expert (intervention = "telemedical support") will improve the quality of care provided by paramedics to infant simulator mannequins with life threatening illness (respiratory failure). Paramedics receiving real-time telemedical support by a pediatric expert may provide better care due to decreased cognitive burden, critical action checking, protocol verification, and error correction. Because real pediatric life-threatening illnesses are rare, high stakes events and involve a vulnerable population (children), this RCT will test the effect of the intervention on paramedic performance in simulated cases of pediatric medical emergencies. The two specific aims for this research are: * Aim 1: To test the intervention efficacy by determining if there is a measurable difference in the frequency of serious safety events between study groups * Aim 2: To compare two safety event detection methods, medical record review, and video review
This proposal outlines the steps required for the creation of a pilot database of EEG recordings and de-identified medical records from patients internally referred within the UNMH Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. The UNMH EEG Corpus would be the first database of its kind. Other public databases contain either patient EEG signals or medical records, but without both kinds of information, it is impossible to relate pre-treatment neurobiomarkers with post-treatment prognosis. The database will also contain information that can improve seizure localization based off of scalp and intracranial EEG, and the requisite data for the creation of algorithms that forecast seizure activity; a development that could ultimately lead to novel responsive neural stimulation procedures that suppress seizures before they begin.
Background: While the intensive care of patients with life-threatening brain illnesses has advanced tremendously, a large number of therapies are still without proper scientific support. This can be partly explained by the fact that mechanisms of initial brain injury are still not well understood. Why additional neurological injury occurs during a patient's stay in the NeuroCritical Care Unit (NCCU) despite current best, evidence-based clinical practices, is also not well understood. However, over the past decade, better tools have become available to measure and monitor the impact of our clinical care on the rapidly changing physiology and chemistry of the injured brain. Some of these tools are CT, MRI, ultrasound, and catheter-based technology measuring blood flow and metabolism. These tools have enabled earlier detection of injury and complications and newer therapeutic strategies. Purpose: Examine disease pathways common to all brain injuries seen in the University of Maryland's 22-bed NCCU. Life-threatening neurological illnesses cared for in the NCCU include massive stroke, bleeding in and around the brain (subarachnoid hemorrhage, intracerebral hemorrhage, subdural hemorrhage, intraventricular hemorrhage), brain tumors, difficult to control seizures, neurologic infections, nerve and muscle diseases (such as myasthenia gravis or Guillain-Barre Syndrome), and spinal cord disorders among others. Many NCCU patients are comatose or paralyzed and may suffer injuries in other parts of the body as well. This effort will require the creation of a robust clinical database for the capture of data including patient characteristics (age, sex), clinical characteristics, medical treatments, surgical interventions, physiological data (such as vital signs, cerebral blood flow, intracranial pressure, cerebral oximetry, etc), laboratory data, and standard-of-care diagnostic studies such as electroencephalography (EEG), ultrasound, CT, MRI, and angiograms. Similar databases exist at other major centers for neurocritical care and have been instrumental to the identification of characteristics both predictive of and associated with outcomes of patients long after their stay in the NCCU. In addition, the samples collected will be included in the University of Maryland Medicine (UMM) Biorepository which is a shared resource to enable biomedical research by University of Maryland faculty.
Electrographic seizures are common in critically ill patients leading to increased use of resource-intense continuous EEG monitoring for seizure identification and management. When identified, electrographic seizures are generally treated with anti-seizure medications, but there are very limited data available regarding optimal treatment in terms of the efficacy or safety of specific anti-seizure medications or overall management strategies. This is a single-center prospective observational study. The investigators aim to: (1) track critically ill patients undergoing clinically indicated EEG monitoring and seizure management to identify risk factors for electrographic seizures, (2) create prediction models guiding EEG monitoring resources to the patients at highest risk for seizures, and (3) evaluate our current management strategy in terms of safety.