Quantitative EEG During Critical Illness Correlates With Patterns of Long-Term Cognitive Impairment

Quantitative EEG During Critical Illness Correlates With Patterns of Long-Term Cognitive Impairment, Clinical EEG and Neuroscience, Ahead of Print. ObjectiveMany intensive care unit (ICU) survivors suffer disabling long-term cognitive impairment (LTCI) after critical illness. We compared EEG characteristics during critical illness with patients’ 1-year neuropsychological outcomes., Clinical EEG and Neuroscience, Ahead of Print.
ObjectiveMany intensive care unit (ICU) survivors suffer disabling long-term cognitive impairment (LTCI) after critical illness. We compared EEG characteristics during critical illness with patients’ 1-year neuropsychological outcomes.MethodsWe performed a post hoc analysis of patients in the BRAIN-ICU study who had undergone EEG for clinical purposes during admission (n = 10). All survivors underwent formal cognitive assessments at 12-month follow-up. We evaluated EEGs by conventional visual inspection and computed 10 quantitative features. We explored associations between EEG and patterns of LTCI using Wilcoxon rank-sum tests and Spearman’s rank correlations.ResultsOf 521 Vanderbilt patients enrolled in the parent study, 24 had EEG recordings during admission. Ten survivors had EEG tracings available and completed follow-up cognitive testing. All but one inpatient EEG showed generalized background slowing. All patients demonstrated cognitive impairment in at least one domain at follow-up. The most common deficits occurred in delayed memory (DM—median index 62) and visuospatial/constructional (VC—median index 69) domains. Relative alpha power correlated with VC score (ρ = 0.78, P = .008). Peak interhemispheric coherence correlated negatively with DM (ρ = −0.81, P = .018).ConclusionsQuantitative EEG features during critical illness correlated with domain-specific cognitive performance in our small cohort of ICU survivors. Further study in larger prospective cohorts is required to determine whether these relationships hold.SignificanceEEG may serve as a prognostic biomarker predicting patterns of long-term cognitive impairment., admin,