ArticleScientific reports2026
An experimental study of the effect of neuromuscular blockade on EEG-based measures of awareness.
Article in Scientific reports, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Both basic and clinical consciousness research aims to find objective measures that reliably distinguish conscious from unconscious brain states. Electroencephalogram (EEG) measures are widely used, although they may be affected by interference from electrical signals such as those generated by muscles. To assess this source of error, we investigated the impact of neuromuscular blockade (NMB) on proposed measures of awareness (spectral slope, Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZc), connectivity, alpha peak frequency, power in canonical EEG frequency bands) computed from spontaneous high-density EEG recorded from six healthy volunteers in three different conditions: (1) awake-unparalysed (normal wakefulness), (2) awake-paralysed (complete paralysis caused by neuromuscular blocking agent (NMBA)), and (3) sedated-paralysed (deep sedation with propofol, with paralysis by NMBA). The measures we investigated distinguished awake-unparalysed states from sedated-paralysed with close to perfect accuracy in accordance with past findings. However, our analysis revealed a serious failure of most measures to recognise the awake-paralysed condition as an aware state. Errors ranged from 7% of awake-paralysed time segments predicted as unaware (using alpha power) to 100% (using LZc). Using a unique high-density EEG data set, this study clearly demonstrates that many EEG-based measures fail to recognise awareness in awake subjects under the influence of muscle relaxants. These results highlight critical limitations of current EEG-based measures at detecting awareness.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.