New Guidance on Identifying Brain Death

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Andrew N. Wilner, MD: Welcome to Medscape. I'm Dr Andrew Wilner. Today my guest is Dr Gene Sung, the senior author of a recent paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association on a refined approach to determining brain death. It comes from the World Brain Death Project. Welcome, Dr Sung.

Gene Sung, MD: Thank you.

Wilner: 'You're the former president of the Neurocritical Care Society. Was it your interest in neurocritical care that exposed you to these situations where you assess whether the patient is brain-dead and got you involved in this project?

Sung: Yes, it's very much so.

Wilner: The name World Brain Death Project sounds pretty ambitious.

Sung: At the same time, it seemed easier than it ended up being, which was a 5-year project. But it was definitely a project we felt was of great importance.

Wilner: What did the project conclude?

Sung: There were two main goals. One was to try to minimize differences in the determination of brain death occurring worldwide, and the other was to provide almost a textbook of what we currently know about brain death as a resource for anybody who had questions about it or its features.