Martina Cacciatore

• Fondazione I.R.C.C.S. Istituto Neurologico Carlo Besta

Introduction The Coma Recovery Scale-Revised (CRS-R) is the recommended tool to assess consciousness in patients with prolonged Disorders of Consciousness (pDoC). However, the time needed to administer it may limit its use. A shorter tool has been validated: the Simplified Evaluation of CONsciousness Disorders (SECONDs). This multicentre study aime...

In this paper, through Rasch analysis, we reconfirmed that the Coma Recovery Scale-Revised (CRS-R), recognized as the gold standard tool for measuring disorders of consciousness, has outstanding measurement properties compatible with interval-level measurement, typical of instruments used in the physical sciences (e.g., thermometer). This is the la...

The Coma Recovery Scale-revised (CRS-r) is the gold standard for the behavioral assessment of patients with Disorders of Consciousness (DoCs). However, the misdiagnosis rate is around 40%. For this reason, recent guidelines suggested enhancing the assessment with neurophysiological measures: among these, surface electromyography (sEMG) represents a...

Background: Occupational e-mental health (OeMH) interventions significantly reduce the burden of mental health conditions. The successful implementation of OeMH interventions is influenced by many implementation strategies, barriers, and facilitators across contexts, which, however, are not systematically tracked. One of the reasons is that interna...

Caregivers’ involvement in the diagnostic and monitoring processes of the level of consciousness of patients with Disorders of Consciousness (DoC) is strongly encouraged by international guidelines, as current literature suggests a better chance to detect behavioural responses when caregivers are involved in clinical assessments. Since caregivers’...

Introduction From a neurobiological perspective, consciousness and sleep are strictly related. It is known that regular sleep patterns may reflect the preservation of brain functions. Detailed sleep assessment Disorders of Consciousness (DOC) patients is a controversial issue. Methods Twenty-two patients (11 females and 11 males, mean age 52.2 + 1...

Introduction In the last decades, the role of the neurophysiological techniques in the assessment of Disorders of Consciousness (DOCs) after severe acquired brain injuries has been enhanced, leading to a growing interest in this challenging field. However, only few works focused on the presence of bruxism or non-functional jaw muscular activity (NF...

Background Occupational e–mental health (OeMH) interventions significantly reduce the burden of mental health conditions. The successful implementation of OeMH interventions is influenced by many implementation strategies, barriers, and facilitators across contexts, which, however, are not systematically tracked. One of the reasons is that internat...

This chapter aims to present the main results of several studies analyzing the burden of caregivers of patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC). An accurate description of the features of DOC patients’ caregivers is provided with reference to both sociodemographic characteristics and motivations underlying the caregivers’ role; furthermore, t...

BACKGROUND Occupational eMental Health (OeMH) interventions significantly reduce the burden of mental health conditions. However, the successful implementation of OeMH interventions is influenced by many implementation strategies, barriers and facilitators across contexts. Therefore, there is a need for practical guidance on the key implementation...

The presence of involuntary, non-functional jaw muscle activity (NFJMA) has not yet been assessed in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC), although the presence of bruxism and other forms of movement disorders involving facial muscles is probably more frequent than believed. In this work, we evaluated twenty-two prolonged or chronic DOC p...

The use of instrumental tools for improving both the diagnostic accuracy and the prognostic soundness in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) plays an important role. However, the most recent international guidelines on DOC published by the American and the European Academies of Neurology and by the UK Royal College of Physicians contain...

Recent studies suggest that COVID-19 survivors may experience long-term health consequences: in particular, neurological and mental health symptoms might be associated with long-term negative outcomes. This study is a secondary analysis of a larger cohort study and aims to determine the extent to which neurological and mental health sequelae are as...

Monitoring the level of responsiveness of patients with Disorders of Consciousness (DoCs) represents an issue in all the settings where there is not the daily presence of clinicians, such as long-term and domestic settings. The involvement of patients’ informal caregivers (i.e., patients’ family) in such a monitoring process is thus fundamental. Ho...

Background: Several people affected by COVID-19 experienced neurological manifestations, altered sleep quality, mood disorders, and disability following hospitalization for a long time. Objective: To explore the impact of different neurological symptoms on sleep quality, mood, and disability in a consecutive series of patients previously hospita...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has dramatically disrupted healthcare systems. Two rapid WHO pulse surveys studied disruptions in mental health services, but did not particularly focus on neurology. Here, a global survey was conducted and addresses the impact of the pandemic on neurology services. Methods A cross-sectional study was carr...

Sleep disorders are among the main comorbidities in patients with a Disorder of Consciousness (DOC). Given the key role of sleep in neural and cognitive functioning, detecting and treating sleep disorders in DOCs might be an effective therapeutic strategy to boost consciousness recovery and levels of awareness. To date, no systematic reviews have b...

The amount of knowledge on human consciousness has created a multitude of viewpoints and it is difficult to compare and synthesize all the recent scientific perspectives. Indeed, there are many definitions of consciousness and multiple approaches to study the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). Therefore, the main aim of this article is to co...

The analysis of the central and the autonomic nervous systems (CNS, ANS) activities during general anesthesia (GA) provides fundamental information for the study of neural processes that support alterations of the consciousness level. In the present pilot study, we analyzed EEG signals and the heart rate (HR) variability (HRV) in a sample of 11 pat...