ObjectiveTo investigate the risk factors affecting the 28-day neurological outcome after admission of patients with sepsis complicated with consciousness disorder, create a simple scoring system, and evaluate its predictive value for the poor neurological outcome.MethodsWe retrospectively collected and analyzed the demographic data, clinical data, 28-day survival status and neurologic outcome of patients with sepsis complicated with disturbance of consciousness admitted to the Emergency Department of West China Hospital of Sichuan University between June 1st, 2017 and May 31st, 2018. Independent risk factors for the 28-day neurologic outcome of patients with disturbance of consciousness were obtained through univariate analyses and multiple logistic regression analysis, and then the continuous variables of risk factors were converted to binary variables according to the cut-off values from receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis, a simple scoring system was established and it’s predictive value for 28-day neurological outcome of patients with sepsis complicated with consciousness disorder was assessed.ResultsA total of 149 patients with sepsis complicated with consciousness disorder were included in this study, including 103 males (69.1%) and 46 females (30.9%), with an average age of (58.2±18.6) years old. There were 72 patients (48.3%) with poor outcome of neurological function on Day 28 after admission. Multiple logistic regression analysis revealed that total bile acid [odds ratio (OR)=1.040, 95% confidence interval (CI) (1.004, 1.077), P=0.027], blood ammonia [OR=1.014, 95%CI (1.001, 1.027), P=0.030], pulmonary infection [OR=3.255, 95%CI (1.401, 7.566), P=0.006], and Glasgow Coma Score (GCS) [OR=0.837, 95%CI (0.739, 0.949), P=0.005] were independent influencing factors for the poor neurological function in patients with sepsis complicated with consciousness disorder on Day 28 after admission. The area under the ROC curve predicting the 28-day poor neurological function was 0.754 [95%CI (0.676, 0.832)], and the sensitivity and specificity were 79.2% and 63.6%, respectively.ConclusionFor emergency patients with sepsis complicated with consciousness disorder, a simple scoring system based on early GCS, pulmonary infection, serum ammonia, and total bile acid has a favorable predictive value for short-term neurological function.
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.