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Treatment of Resistant Fever: New Method of Local Cerebral Cooling

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Abstract

Background

Fever in neurocritical care patients is common and has a negative impact on neurological outcome. The purpose of this prospective observational study was (1) to evaluate the practicability of cooling with newly developed neck pads in the daily setting of neurointensive care unit (NICU) patients and (2) to evaluate its effectiveness as a surrogate endpoint to indicate the feasibility of neck cooling as a new method for intractable fever.

Methods

Nine patients with ten episodes of intractable fever and aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage were treated with one of two different shapes of specifically adapted cooling neck pads. Temperature values of the brain, blood, and urinary bladder were taken close meshed after application of the cooling neck pads up to hour 8.

Results

The brain, blood, and urinary bladder temperatures decreased significantly from hour 0 to a minimum in hour 5 (P < 0.01). After hour 5, instead of continuous cooling in all the patients, the temperature of all the three sites remounted.

Conclusion

This study showed the practicability of local cooling for intractable fever using the newly developed neck pads in the daily setting of NICU patients.

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Acknowledgments

The project was supported by the GEBERT-RÜF foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurosurgery, Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit, University Hospital of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Susanne Mink & Emanuela Keller

  2. Department of Neurology, Neuroscience ICU, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 75 Francis Street, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Susanne Mink

  3. Department of Neurology, University Hospital of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Urs Schwarz

  4. Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland

    Regina Mudra & Christoph Gugl

  5. Laboratory for Electromagnetic Fields and Microwave Electronics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland

    Jürg Fröhlich

Authors
  1. Susanne Mink
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  2. Urs Schwarz
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  3. Regina Mudra
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  4. Christoph Gugl
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  5. Jürg Fröhlich
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  6. Emanuela Keller
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Correspondence to Susanne Mink.

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Mink, S., Schwarz, U., Mudra, R. et al. Treatment of Resistant Fever: New Method of Local Cerebral Cooling. Neurocrit Care 15, 107–112 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12028-010-9451-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12028-010-9451-1

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