Cerebral Autoregulation Monitoring in Traumatic Brain Injury: An Overview of Recent Advances in Personalized Medicine

Impaired cerebral autoregulation (CA) in moderate/severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been identified as a strong associate with poor long-term outcomes, with recent data highlighting its dominance over cerebral physiological dysfunction seen in the acute phase post-injury. With advances in bedside continuous cerebral physiological signal processing, continuously derived metrics of CA capacity have been described over the past two decades, leading to improvements in cerebral physiological insult detection and development of novel personalized approaches to TBI care in the intensive care unit (ICU). This narrative review focuses on highlighting the concept of continuous CA monitoring and consequences of impairment in moderate/severe TBI. Further, we provide a comprehensive description and overview of the main personalized cerebral physiological targets, based on CA monitoring, that are emerging as strong associates with patient outcomes. The CA-based personalized targets, such as optimal cerebral perfusion pressure (CPPopt), lower/upper limit of regulation (LLR/ULR), and individualized intracranial pressure (iICP) are positioned to change the way we care for patients with TBI in the ICU, moving away from the "one treatment fits all" paradigm of current guideline-based therapeutic approaches toward a true personalized medicine approach tailored to the individual patient. Future perspectives regarding research needs in this field are also discussed.