May 2026: Acute Nontraumatic Increased Intracranial Pressure and Emergency Neonatal Care

While you're finishing up a chart for a patient, you hear somebody yelling, "Delivery in the ambulance bay." You run over, you realize that a patient has delivered and that there's a baby that you know how to take care of, and you wonder, "How do I make sure that this neonate is okay?"

Once you've gotten that emergency settled, the next patient you pick up presents with altered mental status, and you learn that they have had a VP shunt placed previously.

And you wonder, "Is this something related to their shunt?"

[instrumental music] In this episode of Critical Decisions in Emergency Medicine, we will talk about emergency neonatal care, specifically at birth and within the 28 days after that.

We will also discuss increased intracranial pressure, specifically related to non-traumatic causes.

With you is Dr. Dania Koja.

I'm an emergency physician who practices in Florida and all over the world.

And this is Dr. Wendy Cheng, an emergency physician and neurointensivist in the Baltimore-Washington region.

And this is the May 2026 episode of Critical Decisions in Emergency Medicine podcast.

Each month, we discuss two lessons that are bread and butter emergency medicine or things that are cutting edge.

In addition to the two lessons, there are also a lot of other features such as the critical procedure, critical cases in orthopedics and trauma, and the critical image.