Clinical application of neuromodulation therapy in patients with disorder of consciousness: A pooled analysis of 544 participants

BACKGROUND: The number of patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC) has increased dramatically with the advancement of intensive care and emergency medicine, which brings tremendous economic burdens and even ethical issues to families and society. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effectiveness of neuromodulation therapy for patients with DoC. METHODS: First, we conducted a literature review of individual patient data (IPD) on PubMed, EMBASE, and Cochrane-controlled trials following PRISMA guidelines. Then, we collected neuromodulation cases from our institution. Finally, we conducted a pooled analysis using the participants from the medical literature (n = 522) and our local institutions (n = 22). RESULTS: In this pooled analysis of 544 patients with DoC with a mean age of 46.33 years, our results revealed that patients have improved CRS-R scores [1.0 points (95% CI, 0.57–1.42)] after neuromodulation. Among them, patients have better effectiveness in traumatic than non-traumatic etiology (P < 0.05). The effectiveness of consciousness improvement could be affected by the age, baseline consciousness state, and duration of stimulation. Compared with non-invasive intervention, an invasive intervention can bring more behavioral improvement (P < 0.0001) to MCS rather than UWS/VS patients. Importantly, neuromodulation is a valuable therapy even years after the onset of DoC. CONCLUSION: This pooled analysis spotlights that the application of neuromodulation can improve the behavioral performance of patients with DoC. A preliminary trend is that age, etiology, baseline consciousness state, and stimulation duration could impact its effectiveness.