Sleep patterns associated with the severity of impairment in a large cohort of patients with chronic disorders of consciousness

Brain injury due to severe anoxic, hemorrhagic or traumatic events often lead to chronic disorders of consciousness (DOCs), which have recently received increasing attention because of growing medical and ethical concerns relating to patient management. A considerable proportion of survivors of severe brain damage enter an unresponsive wakefulness syndrome/vegetative state (UWS/VS) or minimally conscious state (MCS) (Laureys et al., 2010) and a number of studies have assessed more or less extensive series of DOC patients using imaging procedures or neurophysiological evaluations designed to provide information supporting the clinical assessment of different degrees of DOCs or to identify prognostic markers (see reviews by Bender et al., 2015; Kondziella et al., 2015).

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