IN an extensive study of the intraventricular fluid pressure (VFP) in patients suffering from intracranial hypertension, Lundberg (1960) was able to identify mainly three forms of variations in pressure. Thus, a great number of patients with a substantial increase of the mean pressure were observed to have large, suddenly appearing "plateau-waves " in their VFP records with peaks of up to about 110 mmHg. Such waves corre-lated to a typical, more or less pronounced, group of transient clinical symptoms including headache, nausea, slurring of consciousness, hyper-pncea and vomiting, as well as various motor phenomena such as clonic convulsive movements and tonic rigidity in the limbs. He concluded that the attacks seen during plateau-waves were identical to those previously described by several authors under different terms, such as e.g. "cere-bellar, " or "tonic fits, " or "mesencephalic, " "decerebrate, " "opisthotonic seizures " (cf. Lundberg, 1960, for a thorough review of pertinent literature). The second main form of VFP variations occurred rhythmically with a frequency of 1-2 per minute and was found to be synchronous to periodic breathing. A third form, 6-per-minute waves, had less amplitude and was correlated to so-called Traube-Hering waves in the systemic blood pressure. The present investigation includes 6 of the patients in Lundberg's (1960) original series in which the EEG was recorded for long periods simultan-eously with continuous registration of the VFP. There were two main results of the study. Firstly, it was found that the attacks which accom-pany plateau-waves of the VFP were not accompanied by epileptic or other forms of paroxysmal cortical discharges in the EEG. Secondly, the small changes seen in the EEG concomitant to the plateau-waves indicated that by guest on M
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Ingvar et al. (1961) studied this question.