Fever is common after acute brain injury causing increased oxygen consumption, release of
excitatory neurotransmitters, injury to the blood brain barrier, increased neuronal cell death
and unfavorable neurological outcome in a variety of experimental models of brain
injury 12, 3
.
Fever in adults with cardiac arrest and stroke, children with traumatic brain injury (TBI),
and neonates with birth asphyxia is independently associated with worse outcome versus
patients who are normothermic 4–6. In children, fever is common in the first 24 hours after
resuscitation from cardiac arrest 7, 8
.
Current American Heart Association guidelines recommend avoidance of fever and the
consideration of therapeutic hypothermia (HT) for children remaining comatose after
cardiac arrest but there are no recommendations for how to monitor or manipulate
temperature 9, 10. Avoidance of fever is also recommended in the pediatric TBI guidelines
but again without treatment recommendations if fever occurs 11
.
Therapeutic HT (target temperature 32–34°C) is used clinically and is being tested as a
neuroprotectant in randomized, clinical trials after cardiac arrest and TBI in our pediatric
ICU 12. Neuroprotection is best achieved by rapid achievement of target temperature 13, 14
.
Previous experience has shown that induction of HT can be slow when using surface cooling
in children with brain injury 15. Optimized surface cooling devices or catheter-based cooling
systems are not available for children, and intravenous cold saline is an attractive alternative
method as studies using intravenous cold saline in adults have a good safety profile and
efficacy 16–18
.
We describe our center’s experience with the use of intravenous cold saline for temperature
control in pediatric neurocritical care. We hypothesized that intravenous cold saline would
be a relatively safe and effective method to decrease temperature promptly in children with
acute brain injury.