Skip to main content

REVIEW article

Front. Cognit.
Sec. Perception
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcogn.2025.1503028
This article is part of the Research Topic Detrimental Effects of Hypoxia on Brain and Cognitive Functions View all 3 articles

EEG as a Neural Measure of Hypoxia-Related Impairment: A Review

Provisionally accepted
Stephanie R Otto Stephanie R Otto 1,2*Cammi K Borden Cammi K Borden 1,3Daniel McHail Daniel McHail 1Kara J Blacker Kara J Blacker 1
  • 1 Naval Medical Research Unit Dayton, Dayton, United States
  • 2 Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE), Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States
  • 3 Leidos (United States), Reston, Virginia, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Ambient oxygen decreases with increasing altitude, which poses a primary threat to aviators known as hypoxic hypoxia. Decades of research have shown that hypoxia impairs cognition, but the neurophysiological bases for these effects remain poorly understood. Recent advances in neuroscience have permitted noninvasive observation of neural activity under controlled hypoxia exposures and have begun to uncover how the brain responds to hypoxia. Electroencephalography (EEG) in particular has been used to explore how electrical activity produced by networks of cortical neurons changes under hypoxia. Here we review studies that have explored how hypoxia affects prominent EEG brain rhythms as well as responses to specific events or stimuli in the time and frequency domains. Experimental conditions have varied widely, including whether hypoxia exposures were normobaric or hypobaric and the range of equivalent altitudes and durations of exposures. Collectively, these studies have accumulated support for a variety of candidate neural markers of hypoxia impairment spanning sensory and cognitive domains. Continued research will build on these findings to leverage emerging technologies in neuroscience and further our understanding of how hypoxia affects cognition and associated neural activity.

    Keywords: hypoxia, EEG, Event-related potentials, Military aviation, physiological monitoring

    Received: 27 Sep 2024; Accepted: 15 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Otto, Borden, McHail and Blacker. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Stephanie R Otto, Naval Medical Research Unit Dayton, Dayton, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.