Five-Year Experience on Patients with Brain Death Diagnosis: A Two-Centered Retrospective Study

INTRODUCTION: Brain death (BD) diagnosis is a clinical diagnosis, but in many countries, other confirmatory tests are obligatory. The study was aimed to investigate the clinical effects of the current process of BD in Turkey.
METHODS: This study was performed retrospectively by evaluating BD-diagnosed patients’ files and computer records in the XXX University Hospital Anesthesiology Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and in a XXX hospital’s general ICU. This study was conducted between 2012 and 2017 in Turkey.
RESULTS: Of the 57 patients included in the study, 63.2% were male (n = 36), and 36.8% were female (n = 21). The most common causes of hospital admissions were cerebral hemorrhage (38.6%; n = 22) and trauma (36.8%; n = 21). Of the patients who accepted organ transplantation, 80% (n = 4) were diagnosed at an average of 60 hours (min 24, max 120). The rates of using imaging methods in the clinical diagnosis of BD were as follows: 75.4% (n = 43) for Computerised Tomography (CT), 17.5% (n = 10) for Computerized Tomographic Angiography (CTA), and 7% (n = 4) for Transcranial Doppler (TD) Ultrasonography. Of the patients, 8.78% (n = 5) were used as donors.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Studies in the literature have indicated that the short duration of BD diagnosis will lead to an increase in organ donation acceptance rates. This study found that the diagnosis time was longer than presented in the literature and that CTA was the most commonly used imaging modality in addition to the apnea test.