The recovery process of brain damage caused by an acute severe cerebral hypoxia has been reported in various literatures. And the possibility of complete recovery of such case was said to be good in younger age group than in adult's group. We experienced a case of cardiac arrest of a 12 year old girl during halothane anesthesia induction and the cardiac and pulmonary resuscitation was succeeded promptly. But the hypotensive period persted for few minutes before the diagnosis was made. The condition of the patient after the resuscitation was good except that her unconsciousness state persisted unusually. The proposed appendectomy performed uneventfully and the anesthesia recovery of the patient was carefully observed in our I.C.U. The uncoscious state lasted for 2 days with agitated movements of legs, EEG showed abnormal, irregular patterns but showed no signs of damage of gobus pallidum and putamen. During the first month, the order of recovery of cerebral function was comatous state, swallowing, eating, and urination. The cerebellar dysunction was prominent. Then recovery of amnesia and defection followed. Speech and gate started to regain in the 26 and 36 post-operative day respectively. Writing function started recover quickly with the recovery of speech function, which occurred in 4 to 6 post-operative months. Recovery of intelligence was slowest and gradually reached to the intelligent level of 11 year old child in one year. It was found the primitive function recovered first and the highly cultivated function recovered last.
Amnesia ; Anesthesia* ; Appendectomy ; Brain* ; Child ; Deglutition ; Diagnosis ; Dihydroergotamine ; Eating ; Electroencephalography ; Female ; Halothane ; Heart Arrest* ; Humans ; Hypoxia, Brain ; Intelligence ; Leg ; Putamen ; Resuscitation ; Unconsciousness ; Urination ; Writing