Analysis of Cardio-Cerebral Crosstalk Events in an Adult Cohort from the CENTER-TBI Study

Objective: In a previous study, we observed the presence of simultaneous increases in intracranial pressure (ICP) and the heart rate (HR), which we denominated cardio-cerebral crosstalk (CC), and we related the number of such events to patient outcomes in a paediatric cohort. In this chapter, we present an extension of this work to an adult cohort from the Collaborative European NeuroTrauma Effectiveness Research in TBI (CENTER-TBI) study. Methods: We implemented a sliding window algorithm to detect CC events. We considered subwindows of 10-min observations. If simultaneous increases of at least 20% in ICP and HR occurred with respect to the minimum ICP and HR values in the time windows, a CC event was detected. Correlation between the number of CC events and mortality was then obtained. Results: The cohort consisted of 226 adults (aged 16–85 years). The number of CC events that were detected varied (mean 50, standard deviation 58). A point biserial correlation coefficient of −0.13 between mortality and CC was found. Although the correlation was weaker than that seen in the paediatric cohort (−0.30), the negative direction was replicated. Conclusion: In this work, we first extracted CC events from ICP and HR observations of adult patients with traumatic brain injury and related the number of CC events to patient outcomes. Consistency with the previous results in the paediatric cohort was observed. The more crosstalk events occurred, the better the patient outcome was.