Retrospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Crit Care Med. Nov 4, 2015; 4(4): 296-301
Published online Nov 4, 2015. doi: 10.5492/wjccm.v4.i4.296
Therapeutic temperature modulation is associated with pulmonary complications in patients with severe traumatic brain injury
Kristine H O’Phelan, Amedeo Merenda, Katherine G Denny, Kassandra E Zaila, Cynthia Gonzalez
Kristine H O’Phelan, Amedeo Merenda, Departments of Neurology and Neurosurgery, University of Miami, Miami, FL 33136, United States
Katherine G Denny, Department of Neurology, University of California Davis, Sacramento, CA 95817, United States
Kassandra E Zaila, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY 13323, United States
Cynthia Gonzalez, Division of Neurocritical Care, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0662, United States
Author contributions: O’Phelan KH and Gonzalez C designed the research; Zaila KE and Gonzalez C performed the research; Denny KG performed the statistical analysis; O’Phelan KH and Merenda A wrote the paper.
Institutional review board statement: This study was reviewed and approved by the IRB (institutional review board) for the University of Miami and the Jackson Memorial Hospital.
Informed consent statement: Informed consent was waived due to negligible risk of harm and the significant importance of evaluating a complete data set. All personal identifiers were removed prior to analysis.
Conflict-of-interest statement: None of the authors have any conflicts of interests. This work was performed without funding.
Data sharing statement: Technical appendix, statistical code and dataset available from the corresponding author at kophelan@med.miami.edu.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Kristine H O’Phelan, MD, Associate Professor of Clinical Neurology, Departments of Neurology and Neurosurgery, University of Miami, 1120 NW 14th St, Miami, FL 33136, United States. kophelan@med.miami.edu
Telephone: +1-305-2434621 Fax: +1-305-2437081
Received: May 14, 2015
Peer-review started: May 14, 2015
First decision: June 24, 2015
Revised: July 8, 2015
Accepted: August 4, 2015
Article in press: August 7, 2015
Published online: November 4, 2015
Processing time: 176 Days and 14 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Therapeutic hypothermia and normothermia (fever control) are used in patients with traumatic brain injury. This is most commonly done for intracranial hypertension control. The potential complications associated with this therapy when it is used outside of the scope of a closely regulated clinical trial are not well known. This is a retrospective review of patients with traumatic brain injury treated with therapeutic temperature modulation carried out to quantify the non neurological complications associated with this therapy.