Cortical Responses to Auditory Stimulation Predict the Prognosis of Patients with Disorders of Consciousness

Objective: This study aimed to assess the prognosis of patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC) using auditory stimulation with electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings.

Methods: We enrolled 72 patients with DoC in the study, which involved subjecting patients to auditory stimulation while EEG responses were recorded. Coma Recovery Scale-Revised (CRS-R) scores and Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) were determined for each patient and followed up for three months. A frequency spectrum analysis was performed on the EEG recordings. Finally, the power spectral density (PSD) index was used to predict the prognosis of patients with DoC based on a support vector machine (SVM) model.

Results: Power spectral analyses revealed that the cortical response to auditory stimulation showed a decreasing trend with decreasing consciousness levels. Auditory stimulation-induced changes in absolute PSD at the delta and theta bands were positively correlated with the CRS-R and GOS scores. Furthermore, these cortical responses to auditory stimulation had a good ability to discriminate between good and poor prognoses of patients with DoC.

Conclusions: Auditory stimulation-induced changes in the PSD were highly predictive of DoC outcomes.

Significance: Our findings showed that cortical responses to auditory stimulation may be an important electrophysiological indicator of prognosis in patients with DoC.