Determination of Brain Death

To the Editor The Special Communication by Dr Greer and colleagues aimed to promote international guidelines for the determination of BD/DNC. However, the potential of this article is diminished by an inconsistency in their recommendations. The authors addressed 3 “special circumstances” in which continued or even additional postmortem somatic support may be permissible: if the decedent has a planned organ donation, if the decedent is pregnant, or if family members object to using BD/DNC and the hospital agrees to continue support. For these decedents, Gr eer and colleagues suggested that health care teams manage respiratory, endocrine, hematological, and, when applicable, reproductive systems complications with additional support, including initiating cardiopulmonary resuscitation and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation in certain circumstances.
Source: JAMA - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research