Sleep spindles may help discern who may regain consciousness, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Something called sleep spindles are spikes that show up in an electroencephalogram, or EEG, and may help predict whether someone  who’s had a brain injury will regain consciousness, new research shows. Johns Hopkins critical care neurologist Susanne Muehlschlegel says this adds a new dimension to previous work on cognitive motor dissociation, or CMD, to help make the call.

Muehlschlegel: What they did is record routine EEGs, which we do and then looked for things that even the average EEG reader can recognize, which are sleep spindles. And they quantified how often that happened correlated with outcome and then compared it to their CMD. It's a much easier detection marker that you don't need special data analysts, you can just have a regular EEG reader look for them, and they were also able to show that apparently it shows up earlier so it's an earlier marker.    :33

Muehlschlegel is encouraged by the work and hopes to see it validated. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.