[The clinico-laboratory criteria of brain death in neurosurgical patients]

With the purpose of developing scientifically substantiated criteria for brain death complex of clinical and physiological, biochemical, physicochemical, and morphological studies was initiated in 55 patients in a critical state because of a dangerous craniocerebral injury, tumours, and vascular affections of the brain. Generalized in the paper are well-known parameters characterizing irreversibility of changes. The following items are to be regarded as the principal criteria for brain death at the present stage of development of medicine: death of truncus cerebri and irreversibility of metabolic disturbances in brain activity.