delirium

Novel observations in elderly hip fracture patients.
Rosengarten, B.
Microcirculatory dysfunction in the mind precedes changes in evoked potentials in endotoxin-induced sepsis syndrome in rats.
& Charpentier, P. A. Precipitating factors for delirium in hospitalized elderly persons.
Predictive model and interrelationship with baseline vulnerability.

Developing a anxiety attacks and specific phobias are two examples.
For another example, imagine that you are walking through a dark parking garage toward your vehicle.

Brainstem Death[edit

Oxygen usage of 2 mg/min/100 g is incompatible having an alert state.
In other types of metabolic encephalopathy, or with widespread anatomic harm to the hemispheres, blood flow may stay near normal while metabolism is greatly reduced.
An exception to these statements may be the coma that arises from seizures, in which metabolism and blood circulation are greatly increased.

History and physical exam findings are often enough that will help you categorize the change in mental status as delirium, dementia or psychosis.
Further testing should be ordered as below to greatly help narrow or confirm the differential diagnosis within each of these types of AMS.
Diagnosing a patient with a big change in mental status can be quite a daunting challenge in the Emergency Department .

• This refers to the dynamic and reciprocal interaction of person , environment , and behavior .
• But the amnesic syndrome spares the ability to acquire memories of other kinds, i.e. procedural memories which are demonstrated by their effects on our actions.
• Delirium may simply signal the severity of current brain disruption
• Hypoxia is really a late marker of inadequate ventilation.
• According to the recent Procedural Sedation in the Community Emergency Department registry, emergency clinician-directed procedural sedation resulted in successful completion of procedures 99.4% of that time period, with complications arising in mere 0.6% of cases.

Sleep shares a number of other features with the pathologic states of drowsiness, stupor, and coma.
Upon being awakened from deep sleep, a standard person may be confused for a few moments, as every physician knows from personal experience.
Nevertheless, sleeping persons may still react to unaccustomed stimuli and so are capable of some mental activity in the form of dreams that leave traces of memory, thus differing from stupor or coma.
The most important difference, of course, is that persons in sleep, when stimulated, could be roused to normal and persistent consciousness.
You can find important physiologic differences as well.
Cerebral oxygen uptake will not decrease during sleep, as it usually does in coma.
Recordable electrical activity—electroencephalographic and cerebral evoked responses—and spontaneous motor activity differ in the two states, as indicated later in this chapter and in Chap.

Diagnosis

He interpreted this to mean, in large part correctly, a constant stream of sensory stimuli, provided by trigeminal and spinal sources, was required to maintain the awake state.
More recently, a system of “nonspecific” projections from the thalamus to all or any cortical regions, independent of any specific sensory nucleus has been demonstrated.
The sites at which stimulation led to arousal consisted of a number of points extending from the nonspecific medial thalamic nuclei down through the caudal midbrain.
These loci were situated across the loosely organized core of neurons that anatomists refer to because the reticular system or formation.
The EEG accurately reflects the depth of certain metabolic comas, particularly those caused by hepatic or renal failure.

Careful analysis will show these defects to be tied to inattention and impaired perception or registration of information instead of to a fault in retentive memory.
These phenomena that betray inattention will be the central top features of most confusional states.
As already stated, the observed behavior of a confused person transcends inattention alone.
It may incorporate elements of clouded interpretation of internal and external experience, and an inability to integrate and attach symbolic meaning to see .
The amount of confusion often varies from one time of day to some other.
It is commonly least pronounced each morning and increases as the day wears on, peaking in the first evening hours (“sundowning”) when the patient is fatigued, and environmental cues are not as clear.

Other possible undesireable effects include arrhythmias, myocardial depression, and impaired uptake or release of potentially neurotoxic glutamate in the mind.
If patients that are unresponsive after cardiac arrest have already been treated with hypothermia , 72 hours ought to be added to the above times because hypothermia slows recovery of brain metabolism.