Active clinical trials for "Sepsis-Associated Encephalopathy"

Systemic inflammation and sepsis cause multi organ failure including severe neurologic impairment in the course of disease. Neurologic failure typically presents as critical-illness-polyneuropathy/-myopathy and septic encephalopathy during sepsis and is associated with an increased mortality rate. Clinical parameters to determine the neurologic entities during the course of sepsis are heterogeneous. Further research for an association of clinical parameters and the patients' outcome is needed. The study aims toward differences in the clinical and neurological outcome of surgical and non-surgical septic patients in comparison to non-septic patients on ICU. The aim of the study is to identify clinical and diagnostic outcome predictors in septic patients.

Septic encephalopathy is an important complication of sepsis. Why some patients with sepsis develop septic encephalopathy is unknown. We will investigate whether patients who develop this condition have different patterns of cerebrovascular reactivity and whether it is possible to predict the development of septic encephalopathy from early measurements of cerebral perfusion or from the EEG. We will specifically test the hypotheses that septic encephalopathy may not be predicted by changes in the EEG, and that cerebrovascular autoregulation is not dysfunctional in septic encephalopathy.

The purpose of the study is to evaluate whether variability of CPP (cerebral perfusion pressure) is related to sepsis-associated encephalopathy and outcomes of patients with sepsis.

Sepsis-associated encephalopathy (SAE), is one of the most common organ dysfunction during the acute phase in sepsis and septic shock. Electroencephalogram (EEG) and auditory evoked potentials (AEPs), which reflect different aspects of brain function, are the most commonly used neurophysiological indices to detect acute brain dysfunction in critically ill patients including sepsis and septic shock. AEPs show the systemic responsiveness of the central nervous to auditory stimuli, so they can be considered a direct measure of brain responsiveness. Mismatch negativity (MMN) is a change-specific component of ERPs, which elicited by a deviant stimulus occurring in a sequence of repetitive stimuli. This component is thought to represent the automatic and unconscious detection of acoustic changes which requires good perceptual discriminative capacity and iconic memory. The peaks of MMN appear at 100 ~ 250 ms from deviant stimulus onset; with increasing magnitude of stimulus change, the peak latency of MMN was shortened and the amplitude increased. Since MMN can be elicited even in the absence of attention, subjects do not need to actively participate. The MMN has been extensively demonstrated to be used in the prediction of awakening in comatose patients for various reasons, and also has been reported to predict awakening in deeply sedated critically ill patients recently. However, it remains unclear whether SAE affects MMN in amplitude and latency that reflects cognitive processing of the auditory information. Patients with sepsis and septic shock who met the inclusion criteria were screened daily on the CAM-ICU scale, and those with positive CAM-ICU were diagnosed with SAE.All patients were tested for event-evoked potentials on Day 1 and Day 3 after inclusion and were followed up to Day 28 after discharge. The investigators intend to observe the dynamic change of MMN amplitude and latency between SAE and non-SAE groups. Logic regression analysis was used to determine whether the change of MMN was a predictor of SAE.