It’s always a challenge when someone is unresponsive to determine how active their brain is, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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When a patient is not responsive following a traumatic brain injury it is very difficult to tell when or if they’ll recover. A recent study may help by identifying characteristic tracings on an electroencephalogram, or EEG, that may be associated with recovery. Susanne Muehlschlegel, a critical care neurologist at Johns Hopkins, says this same group has been studying this issue for some time.

Muehlschlegel : Their famous paper from several years ago was on the cognitive motor dissociation, CMD, where they did bedside testing with a very strict protocol of certain motor commands and then recording EKG at the same time. They were able to show a certain percentage of covert consciousness and then also the nice thing they did is correlated with outcome. The issue with CMD though it's very hard to do it's not an immediate easy to use biomarker.  :32

Muehlschlegel says the new study adds to this one and advances our understanding. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.