'The beach position': crossed legs as a marker for a favourable clinical course in neurological intensive care unit patients.

摘要

Why people cross their legs is unknown. Respective literature concerning body language describes the crossing of the legs as a sign of comfort and well-being. Also, in the clinical setting of intensive care medicine patients are found to cross their legs and it has become a common, but empirical, saying in our clinical practice that this is a sign of a favourable clinical course. In order to investigate if this easily detectable clinical finding was an objective predictor of the clinical course, we screened 117 consecutive patients on our neuro intensive care unit (ICU) whose length of stay exceeded 4 days to exclude postoperative fast-track clientele. Intracranial haemorrhage (subarachnoid, intraparenchymal, intraventricular), cerebral ischaemia, traumatic brain injury, intracranial tumours and CNS infection were the-most common diagnoses, being equally distributed within our patient cohort.