Decorticate Posturing In Comatose Patient

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Decorticate posturing in comatose patient. Comatose patients may demonstrate motor responses indicative of more generalized reflexes. Normally people displaying decerebrate or decorticate posturing are in a coma and have poor prognoses with risks for cardiac arrhythmia or arrest and respiratory failure. Decorticate posturing is a type of abnormal or pathologic posturing not to.

A person displaying decorticate posturing in response to pain gets a score of three in the motor section of the glasgow coma scale due to the flexion of muscles due to the neuro muscular response to the trauma. From an external or internal source. Blood alcohol measurements are a vital test in the comatose patient as the clinical picture may be caused or temporarily significantly worsened by severe alcohol intoxication.

This asymmetry has some localising value fig 3. Decerebrate posturing normally indicates severe structural or functional depression of midbrain function but can be caused by depressant drugs. The feet are plantar flexed.

Unilateral decerebrate or decorticate postures can be seen and are an indication of a unilateral lesion. Decorticate posturing consists of adduction of the upper arms flexion of the lower arms wrists and fingers. What causes decorticate posturing.

Decorticate posturing is an abnormal posturing and it is defined as semi flexion adduction and internal rotation at the shoulders and semi flexion or flexion at the elbows clenched fists and legs held out straight 1 the arms are bent in toward the body and the wrists and fingers are bent and held on the chest. There are two parts to decorticate posturing. The first is the disinhibition of the red nucleus with facilitation of the rubrospinal tract.

Decorticate posture this refers to bilateral flexion of the upper limbs and extension of the lower limbs usually the consequence of an upper brain stem lesion. Abnormal postures in comatose patients decorticate rigidity abnormal flexor response in decorticate rigidity the upper arms are flexed tight to the sides with elbows wrists and fingers flexed. Sir charles sherrington was first to describe decerebrate posturing after transecting the brain stems of cats and monkeys causing them to exhibit the posturing.