This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Neurology  • Coma/ Vegetative State  • Prognosis/ Outcomes  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: In their Rational Clinical Examination article about predicting outcomes in comatose patients after cardiac resuscitation, Dr Booth and colleagues¹ frequently discussed the Glasgow Coma Scale and the Glasgow Coma Score. We have several concerns about how the authors represented these instruments.

The original Glasgow Coma Scale contained no numerical values and did not distinguish between flexion-withdrawal and decorticate flexion.² It therefore would have ranged from 3 to 14, had values been assigned. The Glasgow Coma Score, which the authors' Table 1 actually depicts, assigned numerical values to the scale and appeared in 1979.³ This ranges from 3 to 15, even in intubated patients. Teasdale and Jennett, who originated the scale, continue to maintain the distinction between the scale as a means to describe an individual patient and the score as a summary statistic or research tool and reaffirm that the score should be based on a total . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Zsolt T. Stockinger, MD
stockinger@surgery.tulane.edu
Department of Surgery
Tulane University Health Sciences Center and The Charity Hospital of Louisiana in New Orleans

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLES

Usefulness of the Glasgow Coma Score in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest—Reply
Christopher M. Booth and Allan Detsky
JAMA. 2004;291(19):2313.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Is This Patient Dead, Vegetative, or Severely Neurologically Impaired?: Assessing Outcome for Comatose Survivors of Cardiac Arrest
Christopher M. Booth, Robert H. Boone, George Tomlinson, and Allan S. Detsky
JAMA. 2004;291(7):870-879.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT