The EEG in intensive care units for diagnosis, monitoring and prognosis (author's transl)

The clinical electroencephalography of the sixth and seventh decade of this century saw its task in the coordination of EEG-findings and nosological entities. The method seemed to be limited to the discovery of positive correlations of EEG-patterns and diagnoses. The psychopharmacological induced psychodynamics of psychoses, the EEG-dynamics of epileptic patients--enforced by anticonvulsant drugs--and the modern intensive medicine teach us nowaday to leave static EEG-reflection and instead turn to a more pathophysiological way of thinking. Clinical EEG deals only with an actual sample of a continuum, a functional diagram of age, brain metabolism, vigilance and a possibly convulsive capacity. The comparison of samples enables us to have a better insight into the gradient of steppness of EEG-pattern changes. It is to be correlated with clinical and biochemical parameters. Further comparison of samples allows criterions concerning the extent of cerebral lesion, its course, termination, with or without neurological deficiency. In a series of cases of acute neurological, neuropsychiatric and internal diseases the above mentioned necessity of a more pathophysiological EEG-interpretation is being demonstrated.