Median nerve electrical stimulation is a common peripheral nerve electrical stimulation treatment technology in clinic. With simple operation, it has been widely used in clinical to promote coma after craniocerebral trauma, relieve pain, improve cognition, Parkinson’s disease and so on. However, its mechanism has always been a hot topic and difficult part. At present, there are a large number of clinical efficacy studies and animal experiments of median nerve electrical stimulation at home and abroad. This article reviews the clinical application and animal experiments of median nerve electrical stimulation in recent years, and summarizes its mechanism, hoping to contribute to relevant clinical applications and research.
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.