Showing posts with label Academic ramblings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Academic ramblings. Show all posts

Monday, 13 December 2010

Candidacy = DONE

I just thought I'd share the good news:

Candidacy: Passed
Brain: Fuzzy
Feeling: Relieved

Sunday, 6 July 2008

Academic ramblings

Just a brief note. If you or a loved one have a traumatic brain injury (TBI) please make sure that they are fed within a day.

I'm reading an article and it seems that the nutritional needs of individuals with TBI are increased relative to those without injury (you and me) and that this need is not being met early enough. The article states "patients who were not fed within 5 and 7 days after TBI had a 2- and 4-fold increased likelihood of death, respectively." (5% were not fed within 7 days) No kidding - you don't feed them and they are more likely to die eh? I didn't know this was an issue. And a review cited in this paper found that early feeding may be associated with a trend towards better outcomes after TBI. Well, I'm glad the paper has been published so that protocols may change. Obviously they didn't randomly assign the patients to the feeding and no feeding conditions because of ethics so this is a correlational study - thus it doesn't say that lack of food causes an increase in mortality, but rather that they co-occur. But still...

Article:

Hartl, R., Gerber, L. M., Quanhong, N., & Ghajar, J. (2008). Effect of early nutrition on deaths due to severe traumatic brain injury. J Neurosurg. 109, 50-56.

Back to reading.