Abstracts

Rationale: Named coma patterns including alpha coma, spindle coma, suppression burst coma are regularly encountered in critically ill adults undergoing continuous EEG monitoring (cEEG), while their prevalence is unclear in children. Our aim was to determine the prevalence of these patterns during cEEG monitoring of critically ill children.Methods: The Pediatric Critical Care EEG Group (PCCEG) consists of eleven hospitals that routinely perform cEEG on critically ill children. Each site retrospectively enrolled 50 consecutive critically ill children (1 month to 21 years) who underwent clinically indicated cEEG. We collected information regarding subject demographics, clinical characteristics, outcome, and the occurrence of specific EEG patterns. The named coma patterns were identified by primarily EEG reader based on standard definitions and compared to the group as a whole.Results: 550 patients were included in this study. Named coma patterns occurred in 18 (3%) of subjects and included alpha coma in 5 (1%), spindle coma in 6 (1%), and theta coma in 9 (2%). Two subjects had overlapping patterns (theta+alpha, theta+spindle). All subjects with alpha coma had hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy while subjects with theta and spindle coma had a mixture of diffuse, focal, and epilepsy related etiologies. Only 2 of the patients with a coma pattern did not survive to discharge. Conclusions: These data demonstrate that named coma patters are not uncommonly seen in critically ill children. Further study regarding their impact on outcome is warranted.