An experimental study of the effect of neuromuscular blockade on EEG-based measures of awareness
Scientific Reports May 2, 2026 Sebastian Halder, Bjørn Erik Juel, Kenneth J Pope et al.
Many EEG-based measures of consciousness, such as spectral slope, Lempel-Ziv complexity, connectivity, alpha peak frequency, and power in canonical frequency bands, fail to detect awareness in awake individuals who are paralyzed by neuromuscular blocking agents. In a study of six healthy volunteers, these measures distinguished awake-unparalysed states from sedated-paralysed states with near-perfect accuracy, but misclassified 7% to 100% of time segments from awake-paralysed subjects as unaware. The findings highlight critical limitations of current EEG-based measures for detecting awareness, particularly in clinical settings where muscle relaxants are used.