Clinical Pathology

Abstract

Intracerebral haematoma exerts a complex influence on brain function. As a space-occupying lesion it may provoke intracranial pressure rises beyond the brain’s autoregulatory capacity and by this effect alone reduce cerebral blood flow. As local perfusion pressure may vary and at least is unpredictable, regional cerebral blood flow is probably regulated by mechanisms which are even more difficult to define than the normal functional metabolic linkage (Kawakami et al. 1974; Sussman et al. 1974). In hypertensives the normal autoregulatory range of blood pressure variation is shifted to the right, i.e. the lower level of perfusion pressure compatible with the maintained cerebral blood flow has a higher value than in the normotensive (Skinhøj and Strandgaard 1973). In theory this effect of chronic elevated blood pressure would endanger such a patient’s brain function more than normotensives with a proportionate spontaneous intracerebral haematoma.