Multimodal Brain Monitoring-Guided Anesthesia Management Improves Functional Connectivity, Enhances Recovery and...

Perioperative neurocognitive disorder (PND) is common in elderly surgical patients and severely affects postoperative recovery. However, effective prevention is still lacking. Potential perioperative cerebral stressors (including inappropriate sedative/analgesic depth and imbalanced cerebral oxygen supply/demand) may be important contributing factors. We developed an anesthesia management protocol based on multimodal brain monitoring to achieve standardized, individualized, and real-time regulation of sedative/analgesic depth and cerebral oxygen saturation and investigated whether it could reduce the incidence of PND and its underlying mechanisms.

Patients (aged ≥65 years) were randomized into Groups C (n=88) and E (n=93). Patients in Group E received multimodal brain monitoring-guided anesthesia management, and those in Group C received BIS-guided anesthesia management. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) was performed both before and seven days after surgery. The postoperative pain scores were recorded. Resting-state functional MRI data were analyzed to examine functional connectivity (FC).

Group E demonstrated a numerically lower incidence of PND (15.50% vs 21.59% in Group C), but this difference was not statistically significant. Patients in Group E had increased FC within the right pulvinar, right sub-gyral region, and right inferior parietal lobule (P < 0.05). Significantly lower pain scores were observed in Group E at rest (1h: P=0.04; 24h: P=0.04) and during movement (1h: P=0.03).

These results suggest that multimodal brain monitoring-guided anesthesia management may protect neurocognition by enhancing FC within cognition-associated brain regions and attenuating postoperative acute pain. And multimodal brain monitoring-guided anesthesia management may confer a clinically relevant reduction in PND incidence compared to BIS-guided management in elderly surgical patients.