Neurosurgeon Nicholas Theodore recaps his presentation given at the 2022 Congress of Neurological Surgeons, highlighting the first-ever randomized prospective study to assess cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) drainage in acute spinal cord injury. CSF drainage was shown to be safe and a potential adjunct to the treatment of these patients and merits further study.
Hello. I'm dr Nicholas Theodore professor of neurosurgery at johns Hopkins University and going to give a little recap of a presentation that I gave in san Francisco at the congress of neurological surgeons meeting. I was able to present the first ever study and man of a randomized prospective study looking at cerebrospinal fluid drainage in acute spinal cord injury. Today we really only have two maneuvers to treat patients with spinal cord injury. The first being decompression of the spinal cord surgically and the second being elevating the patients mean arterial pressure to improve perfusion of the spinal cord. The reality is that as we do that there are there is a lot of evidence to suggest that as we increase mean arterial pressure in tropical pressure goes up. So the idea of draining cerebrospinal fluid may actually improve outcomes in our patients by augmenting profusion of the spinal cord and the acutely injured patient. So in this study we we randomized 11 patients and were able to show that we were able to sustain, improved in tropical pressure parameters in the patients that were actively drained and ultimately showed that it was safe. Well we had significant improvements in several of the patients in both groups. The reality is that we'll need more patients to determine whether or not this is something that would be viable. But the most important take home message is that through correspondent fluid drainage was not harmful and hopefully will be an adjunct in the treatment of these patients. But those details will unravel as time goes on thank you