ARTICLE SUMMARY:
As patients age, their risk of complications stemming from common conditions or procedures increases, including delirium, a clinical condition associated with acute encephalopathy (AE). Recognizing a gap in the diagnosis of AE, Prolira has a newly FDA-cleared solution to bring objective metrics to delirium screening.
Of any postoperative complication experienced by older adults, acute encephalopathy (AE) is the most common, with nearly half of surgical and ICU patients in the US and Europe at risk. Acute encephalopathy manifests clinically as delirium, characterized by confusion, dissociation, anxiety, and an impaired ability to communicate. AE involving delirium represents a $164 billion total annual expenditure in the US alone, rivaling costs associated with heart disease and diabetes. Despite the cost and frequency of delirium cases, some estimate up to 88% of patients remain undetected in daily care practice due in part to inadequate diagnostics.
Prolira is a start-up founded in 2015 by Rutger Van Merkerk, PhD, and Annemarie Willems based on research conducted by Arjen Slooter, MD, PhD, at the University Medical Centre in Utrecht, Netherlands. Their flagship product, an EEG-based solution dubbed the DeltaScan Brain State Monitor, offers definitive, objective detection for AE before the overt behavioral signs of delirium begin to show. “It’s difficult to diagnose delirium with current methods, and we’ve made it a much more straightforward and quantitative measure,” says recently appointed Prolira CEO Dominic Spadafore, explaining that the current standard of assessment amounts to little more than a questionnaire scored by the attending clinician.
