AUTHOR=Duszyk-Bogorodzka Anna , Zieleniewska Magdalena , Jankowiak-Siuda Kamila TITLE=Brain Activity Characteristics of Patients With Disorders of Consciousness in the EEG Resting State Paradigm: A Review JOURNAL=Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience VOLUME=16 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2022.654541 DOI=10.3389/fnsys.2022.654541 ISSN=1662-5137 ABSTRACT=

The assessment of the level of consciousness in disorders of consciousness (DoC) is still one of the most challenging problems in contemporary medicine. Nevertheless, based on the multitude of studies conducted over the last 20 years on resting states based on electroencephalography (EEG) in DoC, it is possible to outline the brain activity profiles related to both patients without preserved consciousness and minimally conscious ones. In the case of patients without preserved consciousness, the dominance of low, mostly delta, frequency, and the marginalization of the higher frequencies were observed, both in terms of the global power of brain activity and in functional connectivity patterns. In turn, the minimally conscious patients revealed the opposite brain activity pattern—the characteristics of higher frequency bands were preserved both in global power and in functional long-distance connections. In this short review, we summarize the state of the art of EEG-based research in the resting state paradigm, in the context of providing potential support to the traditional clinical assessment of the level of consciousness.