Dr Nick Kane trained in Clinical Neurophysiology at the Burden Neurological
Institute, the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery at Queen
Square, and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. He is a full
time NHS Consultant Clinical Neurophysiologist at North Bristol NHS Trust,
Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at Bristol University and current President of
the Joint Neurosciences Council. Dr Kane is a former winner of the ILAE’s
Jubilee Gower Epilepsy prize, and has clinical neurophysiology research interests in epilepsy, coma and neuroprognostication

The potential role for EEG in the multimodal neuroprognostication of comatose cardiac arrest patients, after resuscitation and therapeutic hypothermia, will include recent findings along with our personal experience from a large single centre cohort of consecutive patients investigated with electrophysiological tests (EEG and SSEP). Although EEG has its limitations, along with all modalities in the multimodal prognostic framework, when timed appropriately and interpreted in a standardized fashion it can be probabilistic but not deterministic of an individual patient’s neurological prognosis. The EEG phenotype can indicate both good and poor prognoses for a comatose patient on the Intensive Care Unit, which is a distinct advantage of this widely available modality, whilst an SSEP can predict a poor outcome.
Core tip: Appropriately timed and reported electroencephalography (EEG) recordings can assist in the multimodal neuroprognostication after out of hospital cardiac arrest, predicting both good and poor outcomes.