Historical collection · First published Oct 28, 2024; added to EM Weekly Oct 27, 2026. This retrospective summary may be superseded by later evidence or guidance.
← All articlesBest Practices Guidelines: The Management of Traumatic Brain Injury
Summary
The revised ACS/ACRM TBI best-practices guidance spans acute and longitudinal care. The official ACS release highlights advanced neuromonitoring for intracranial pressure and cerebral oxygenation, blood-based biomarkers to help characterize injury severity and guide imaging decisions, tiered intracranial-pressure management, early multidisciplinary rehabilitation, and prophylactic antiseizure medication for patients at high risk of early post-traumatic seizures.
Why it matters
This is high-impact trauma guidance with direct implications for ED and early trauma-system imaging, biomarker, monitoring, escalation, and seizure-prevention pathways. The current ACS Trauma Quality Programs index continues to list this TBI guideline.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Guideline
- Population
- Patients with traumatic brain injury across acute trauma care, rehabilitation, and longitudinal follow-up.
- Sample size
- Not applicable
- Intervention
- Revised ACS/ACRM best-practice recommendations for TBI diagnosis, monitoring, acute management, rehabilitation, and follow-up.
- Comparator
- Prior 2015 ACS TBI best-practice guidance and existing local practice; not a comparative trial.
- Primary endpoint
- Evidence-informed and consensus best-practice recommendations across TBI diagnosis, acute care, monitoring, rehabilitation, and longitudinal management.
Main findings
- The official ACS release highlights advanced neuromonitoring for intracranial pressure and cerebral oxygenation.
- Blood-based biomarkers are incorporated to help identify injury severity and guide imaging decisions.
- The revised guidance uses a tiered approach to intracranial-pressure management.
- Early multidisciplinary rehabilitation is emphasized as part of TBI recovery.
- New evidence is cited in support of prophylactic antiseizure medication for patients at high risk of early post-traumatic seizures.
Limitations
The guidance combines published evidence with expert consensus where evidence is limited, and no uniform recommendation-strength grade was identified in the official summary reviewed. The legal PDF was confirmed, but the document was not reviewed end-to-end in this run, so this record does not claim granular recommendation-level verification beyond the official ACS summary.
Recommendation strength
Evidence-based literature when available and expert consensus where evidence is lacking; no uniform recommendation-strength grade was identified in the reviewed official material.
Read the primary source
Full text: Official PDF available.
Original source Official source PDFMaterial reviewed: official society summary.
Source retrieved Oct 27, 2026. Historical backfill. The official ACS release dated 2024-10-28 was reviewed, and the official legal PDF cover/title page was visually verified; the PDF was not reviewed end-to-end. The current ACS Trauma Quality Programs best-practices index still lists this TBI guideline, and targeted 2025-2026 official ACS searches did not surface a superseding TBI edition or correction.
Corrections & review history
No corrections recorded. Human review: not yet human-reviewed.