Cerebral Blood Volume and Intracranial Pressure in Head Injured Patients

The cause of raised intracranial pressure (ICP) in head-injured patients is incompletely understood. Brain swelling due to alterations in cerebral blood volume (CBV) may account for some of the changes in ICP and, if this is true, this may have important therapeutic implications because CBV is one of the easily modified intracranial components. Furthermore, patients with focal injuries may behave differently from patients with diffuse injury. We have therefore studied CBV, cerebral blood flow (CBF) and ICP in patients with head injury.