Development of Methods to Evaluate New Treatments for Acute Head Injury

摘要

This project has developed novel experimental designs to evaluate new treatmentsfor head injury that are more cost effective than conventional trials. These methods allow the evaluation of more agents and combinations of agents, with fewer patients in a shorter time. This is possible by determining the effect that the agents have on measures of cerebral metabolism that were simultaneously developed in this project. The specific aims of this research were: (1) To develop methodologies to test drug therapies in acute severe brain injury based on patient-as-own-control, test-re-test techniques using physiological measurements of cerebral metabolic variables (CMV). (2) To apply these methods to several test agents that were already in clinical use and determine which types of drugs can be tested by the methods developed.