In recent years, with the great breakthroughs in the treatment of brain injury, neurological dysfunction and other serious diseases, more and more patients have been referred to disorders of consciousness (DOC). In clinical work, accurate assessment of DOC is critical to its treatment, and how to assess the level of consciousness and prognosis of patients after treatment has become a hot research topic in recent years. The model of consciousness loss and recovery is an ideal tool to understand the neural mechanism of consciousness, but clinical trials are easily restricted by many factors such as ethics, so animal models are often used as preclinical basic experiments, while non-human primates (NHP) are closely related to humans and are ideal models for studying human diseases. Currently, there are many tests to assess the level of consciousness of NHP, and there are different methods, all of which have certain advantages and limitations. This article reviews the current literature on the current status of the NHP consciousness scale assessment tool, and find that the assessment of NHP consciousness is mainly divided into stimulus response-based assessment after anesthesia experiments, behavioral task completion-based assessment after stimulus-reward experiments, and comprehensive multi-indicator assessment of NHP consciousness level. Therefore, this article provides an overview of the current status of each NHP consciousness scale assessment tool and its advantages and disadvantages in order to provide new thoughts on assessing consciousness from the perspective of animal models in the hope of finding a more appropriate assessment tool.
Citation： KANG Xizhen, YANG Yang, SUN Weiming, HE Binjun, GUO Shuyue, FENG Zhen, MA Chaolin. Analysis of the current status of tools for assessing the level of consciousness scale in non-human primates. West China Medical Journal, 2023, 38(11): 1755-1759. doi: 10.7507/1002-0179.202303220 Copy