3rd Malaysian International MMA Medical Students Conference on Trauma

The 3rd Malaysian International MMA Medical Students conference held at Melaka-Manipal college has just concluded (2nd - 5th June 2011). I must say that it was a huge success given the limited resources they have, especially since the committee members themselves are busy medical students, many of whom are clinical students. I wish that more medical students from Universiti Sains Malaysia could

The Use of Mannitol in Acute Traumatic Brain Injury

Mannitol has been widely used to reduce intracranial pressure (ICP) as early as the 1960s, classically thought to be due to its hyperosmotic action to draw water from the edematous brain. This osmotic property usually takes effect in 15-30 minutes when it sets up an osmotic gradient and draws water out of neurons.However, it was subsequently shown that there was actually less correlation between

Can We Avoid Head CT scan in Some Pediatric Patients With Head Trauma?

In a multicenter trial published in Lancet recently, Kuppermann N et al. enrolled 42,412 children (age, ≤18 years) with mild head trauma (defined as Glasgow Coma Scale score >13) to derive and validate decision rules for two separate age groups:- those below 2 years and- those aged 2 years and above.In that paper, the authors highlighted the need to identify pediatric patients with very low risk