NCS Roundup

Moving Forward Together With the Strength of Our Diverse Community The Neurocritical Care Society (NCS) is proud to launch the 2022 issue of Currents , featuring a compilation of content published on Currents throughout the year. Dr. Michael Reznik, Currents Editor-in-Chief introduces this year's issue... "We continue to envision a bright future for NCS, and this year’s Annual Meeting theme, 'Caring, Curing + Moving Forward,' reflects the optimism within the society that has helped us overcome all the challenges the last several years ...

August is running to its end; the daylight has started to narrow in the northern hemisphere and families are slowly returning from those vacation escapades to deal with the new school year’s adventures. Have you seen this before? NCS is again preparing for the Annual Meeting , this time in San Antonio! This is our second hybrid meeting, with expected record attendance. As we focus more and more on the event of the year , we are also fervently working on multiple other fronts, some distant from the Annual Meeting. The most important of those ...

I hope you are reading this letter in a relaxed environment, a beach, a resort, or at the airport waiting to board for a family vacation far away. I also hope unlike me last week, reading on quarantine, because I got Covid! Yes, indeed, I didn’t get it at its peak in 2020 nor 2021, and not even this winter. I wonder what I did wrong because I did not let down my defenses: I wore masks, washed my hands, used a paper towel when opening doors, and wiped my cellphone. My easy, anecdotal conclusion is this strain of the virus is more transmissible. It felt ...

Brooke Barlow, PharmD ( @TheABofPharmC ); Eric C. Lawson, MD ( @EricLawson90 ) #NCSTJC Moderators : @drdangayach @tchaaban1 Authors: @SWahlster @cj_creutzfeldt @jgranstein #NCSTJC Twitter Thread: https://twitter.com/i/events/1526241410856402944?s=20 Welcome to the #NCSTJC Round-up! May’s NCS Twitter Journal Club featured a lively discussion on the article, “Taking a Chance to Recover: Families Look Back on the Decision to Pursue Tracheostomy in Severe Brain Injury” by William Lou et al published in Neurocritical Care ...

As I am writing these lines, June is not over. But, I am in a hurry to write this letter on this sunny and windy Sunday’s evening, because tomorrow I start a 7-day straight NEURO-ICU service. And I don’t foresee I will have time for anything else. The last time I was in the NEURO-ICU, it was in the end of May and it was busy. I estimate that in a week I spent 93 hours in the hospital and probably more than 85 hours in the NEURO-ICU managing patients. You may immediately say “that is excessive, especially when trainees are not allowed to spend 80 hours/week ...

As I am writing these lines, June is not over. But, I am in a hurry to write this letter on this sunny and windy Sunday’s evening, because tomorrow I start a 7-day straight NEURO-ICU service. And I don’t foresee I will have time for anything else. The last time I was in the NEURO-ICU, it was in the end of May and it was busy. I estimate that in a week I spent 93 hours in the hospital and probably more than 85 hours in the NEURO-ICU managing patients. You may immediately say “that is excessive, especially when trainees are not allowed to spend 80 hours/week ...

Colleagues: The Neurocritical Care Society Board of Directors is pleased to announce that Mindy Saraco has been named the new executive director for the organization. In her role, Mindy will lead the organization’s headquarters staff operations and will be responsible for the implementation of NCS’ strategic priorities. In addition, Mindy appreciates our high expectations of service excellence, organization, and staff accountability. This is an exciting time of growth for NCS that requires strong leadership. Over the last three months, the NCS ...

Lauren Koffman, DO, MS As a member of the Educational Products Committee, one of many committees within the Neurocritical Care Society, I was recently asked to review A Guide to Traumatic Brain Injury: The Intensive Care Unit . This guide was written several years ago by Dr. David Y. Hwang and Dayla Maisey. Dayla narrates the book, providing a firsthand experience of what family members can expect to see, hear and discuss when they have a loved one admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) with a brain injury. After reviewing the guide I could ...

Jenna Gonillo Davis, MS, ACNPC-AG, CCRN Angie Murkins, FNP-BC Ana Kukulj, FNP-C, MSN, BSN, RN Advanced practice providers (APPs) have become the ever-present providers in critical care departments. They act as a stabilizing force for intensive care units (ICU) where residents and fellows rotate and may not have the same level of interest in critical care as a prospective intensivist. The consistent presence of APPs makes the integration, advancement, and education of APPs essential to maintain a highly functional ICU. With ...

Nicolas Chiriboga, MD (@NChiriboga); Eric C. Lawson, MD (@EricLawson90) Moderator: @EricLawson90 Authors: @RebeccaJLevyMD, @ewmayne Link to Twitter Thread: https://twitter.com/neurocritical/status/1513880138328457228?s=21&t=gpKicZn6wmBOKzVi2UCg4Q April’s NCS Twitter Journal Club featured a lively discussion of the article Seizure Risk in Infants After Bypass Without Hypothermic Arrest by Rebecca Levy et al . This was a single-center, observational cohort study that aimed to characterize the risk of seizures ...

Have you planned for your summer vacations? Well, some will say “we prefer snow skiing in the winter”, but I bet that most of you will take some days off to visit a beach, a lake, have a boat-trip. A summer vacation. NCS does not take vacations. It was a busy month for the Society, and June will be similar. There have been new developments on several fronts: NCS has collaborated with our management partner, Smithbucklin, on the pathway to identify our new Executive Director. We have already started the process of interviewing candidates and we will ...

By Panayiotis (Panos) N. Varelas, MD, PhD, FAAN, FNCS May has arrived and even in Upstate New York, nature is changing fast, few days after the last (maybe?) snow. There are already little buds in the trees and even some flowers. Everything is changing, with eternal cycles that repeat themselves, but also with changes that in our lifetimes do not repeat themselves and to our eyes seem dramatically new. Climate change may be one that I witness in my lifetime. Changes happen in a Society like ours, which behaves like a living and thriving organism. ...

Brianna Burlock, MD, MPH; Eric C. Lawson, MD ( @EricLawson90 ) Moderator: @gdomeni Authors: @GreerWaldrop, @sas_mdphd , @MeganRx1 Link to Twitter Thread: https://twitter.com/neurocritical/status/1503728992792231940?s=21 March’s Twitter journal club, done in conjunction with the Curing Coma Campaign ( @CuringComa ) and American Neurological Association ( @TheNewANA1 ), featured a discussion on the article, “Prolonged unconsciousness is common in COVID-19 and associated with hypoxemia” by Greer Waldrop et al. This was ...

By Panayiotis (Panos) N. Varelas, MD, PhD, FAAN, FNCS Yes, There is Hope We are in April and nature is slowly waking up from its white hibernation in the northern states. As I was writing this, I could not restrain myself from drawing a parallel with a major achievement of NCS, the second annual World Coma Day, which just occurred. I hope many of you joined us for the full day of content, but even the few hours of connecting were eye-opening for many of us. Even for providers who work in neuro-ICUs and encounter comatose patients every day, ...

Eric C. Lawson, MD; Karen Berger, PharmD Moderator: @karenccrx Authors: @sa_saldana1 ; @pharmer_mikerx Full Twitter Thread : https://twitter.com/neurocritical/status/1485992755977457665?s=21 January’s Twitter Journal Club featured a discussion on the article, Comparison of Clevidipine and Nicardipine for Acute Blood Pressure Reduction in Hemorrhagic Stroke by Sara Saldana et al. This study was a single-center retrospective observational cohort study with a primary outcome of time to goal systolic blood pressure. Secondary outcomes ...

By Panayiotis (Panos) N. Varelas, MD, PhD, FAAN, FNCS A Focus on Spring As we are moving towards the Ides of March, there is a glimpse of hope that this gloomy day of yore, immortalized as a deadly warning in William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, may not be as bad this year. Even though the pandemic is still here and still affects patients we treat daily in our ICUs, the most recent data seemingly show we are heading towards weathering the storm. Is it going to go away and disappear like a bad dream or linger at a low endemic level, waiting ...

By Panayiotis (Panos) N. Varelas, MD, PhD, FAAN, FNCS Planning for the Future While Staying Safe As we are heading towards February, the world here in Albany and for many colleagues up north, is a snowy white world and a world of scarcity. Behind the windows I was looking at the birds and squirrels next to each other devouring the seeds that my wife and I have thrown out in our snow-filled yard of 2 below zero Fahrenheit. These little creatures survive the harsh winter as we, in a warmer enclosure, survive the letters of the Greek Alphabet: ...

By Panayiotis (Panos) N. Varelas, MD, PhD, FAAN, FNCS Looking Ahead to a New Year As we leave behind a remarkable year and 2022 reaches our shores, I have started thinking — what should we continue and what should we change in this new year The easy answer is, of course, that we would like to get rid of COVID and return to normalcy. Easier said than done. But we are heading toward that direction with more people having access to vaccination and deciding to explore it. At the same time, we see surges of cases in our hospitals, but the patients ...