Cerebral blood flow and metabolism during and after prolonged hypercapnia in newborn lambs

Abstract

Healthy lambs seem to tolerate undergoing hypercapnia for 6 hrs with a return to normocapnia. The return to baseline of CBF and cerebral metabolism at normocapnia seen in our study with lambs may explain why prolonged hypercapnia appears to be well tolerated in mechanically ventilated patients. If these results can be extrapolated to human subjects, our study in lambs supports evidence that patients who have undergone permissive hypercapnia seem to be neurologically unaffected.