A Vanderbilt study reveals that patients treated in intensive care units across the globe are often leaving with cognitive deficits.

Deficits occurred in both older and younger patients, irrespective of whether they had coexisting illness, and persisted to 12 months, with 34 percent and 24 percent still having scores similar to TBI and AD patients, respectively. "As medical care is improving, patients are surviving their critical illness more often, but if they are surviving their critical illness with disabling forms of cognitive impairment then that is something that we will have to be aware of because just surviving is no longer good enough," said lead author Pratik Pandharipande, M.D., MSCI, professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care.
"Regardless of why you come in to an ICU, you have to know that, on the back end of your critical care, you are very likely to be suffering cognitively in ways similar to a TBI patient or an AD patient, except that most of the medical profession doesn't even know that this is happening and few around you suspect anything, leaving most to suffer in silence," said senior author Wes Ely, M.D., professor of Medicine. "Delirium in critically ill, hospitalized adults is a serious yet understudied issue," said Molly Wagster, Ph.D., chief of the Behavioral & Systems Neuroscience Branch in the National Institute on Aging, part of the NIH.
"These new findings provide important evidence of the extent of the problem, the imperative for greater recognition and the pressing need for solutions." Ely said at least some component of this brain injury may be preventable through efforts to shorten the duration of delirium in the ICU by using careful delirium monitoring and management techniques, including earlier attempts at weaning from sedatives and mobility protocols that can save lives and reduce disability. "Even after the patient leaves the hospital, we think that cognitive rehabilitation might be helpful to somebody like this, and we have some early preliminary data supporting this," he said.
Source-Eurekalert