Long-term assessment of post-cardiac-arrest neurological outcomes with somatosensory evoked potential in rats

Cardiac arrest (CA) can produce complex changes in somatosensory evoked potentials (SSEPs). Somatosensory evoked potentials (SSEPs) indicate the intactness of somatosensory pathways and are commonly used for brain function monitoring during surgeries. Multiresolution biorthogonal wavelet analysis was applied to SSEPs recorded during established CA experiments and post-CA long-term recovery periods in rats. Our results showed that during the first 4 hours after CA, the amplitudes of SSEP, defined here as the difference between the amplitudes of P23 and N20, decreased greatly while the inter-peak latencies between N20 and P23 increased greatly. In the long-term recovery period (within 72 hours), both the amplitudes of SSEPs and the interpeak latencies returned to the baseline. Our results suggest that the changes of SSEPs may represent the post-CA neurological injuries and recovery in the somatosensory afferent pathways. The results here lay ground work for establishing the relationship between SSEPs and post-CA neurological injuries and functional outcomes as well as deploying SSEP in clinical settings to monitor patients resuscitated from CA in the future.