The new research findings, published in Annals of Neurology, suggest a correspondence between a patient’s ability to generate an EEG marker of attention to tactile stimulation, and their ability to produce the critical clinical marker of awareness by following verbal commands.
Crucially, this relationship existed for patients who could only follow commands with the more expensive methods of fMRI.
The mental demands of the EEG task are lower than the demands of the fMRI tasks. Furthermore, EEG is entirely portable, inexpensive, and available in the majority of hospitals.
The researchers state that this more simple EEG assessment may be capable of diagnosing a patient’s level of awareness without the need for expensive and challenging fMRI scans, thereby increasing the number of patients who may benefit from a more accurate diagnosis.