Spreading depolarization and spreading ischemia
Welcome
Hello and welcome to the Brain Tsunami website!
If you are a health care professional with an interest in self-study and education in the field of stroke research, we provide a brief introduction to spreading depolarization and spreading ischemia, summarize the history of research in the field, and test your knowledge with a short quiz.
If you are a clinician, we offer a brief tutorial on how to record and monitor spreading depolarizations in the intensive care unit, and how to process the collected data.
SPREADING DEPOLARIZATION AND SPREADING ISCHEMIA
"Brain tsunamis" is the colloquial term for spreading depolarizations, massive waves of neuronal activation that propagate across the surface of the brain and are now known as one key factor for secondary brain damage after traumatic brain injury and stroke.
In this section, we offer an introduction to this phenomenon and its consequences, and help you gain insight into the latest findings and developments in the field of spreading depolarization research.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPREADING DEPOLARIZATION RESEARCH
Since the beginning of the millennium when spreading depolarizations were detected in the injured human brain, a completely new translational research field in neuroscience has emerged. In this section, we invite you to learn more about the history of spreading depolarization research and to meet some of its famous figures.
PRACTICAL GUIDE: RECORDING, ANALYSIS, AND INTERPRETATION
The recording of spreading depolarizations in the human brain with minimally invasive technology is surprisingly simple. In this section, we provide recommendations for electrocorticographic methods to record, classify and score spreading depolarizations and the associated spreading depression of brain electrical activity. In the future, monitoring of spreading depolarizations could enable real-time diagnosis of disturbed brain energy metabolism and lesion development in neurocritical care.
