Recent studies suggest that vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) promotes cognitive and behavioral restoration after traumatic brain injuries. As vagus nerve has wide effects over the brain and visceral organs, stimulation of the sensory/visceral afferents might have a therapeutic potential to modulate the level of consciousness. One of the most important challenges in studying consciousness is objective evaluation of the consciousness level. Brain complexity that can be measured through Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZC) index was used as a novel mathematical approach for objective measurement of consciousness. The main goal of our study was to examine the effects of VNS on LZC index of consciousness. In this study, we did VNS on the anesthetized rats, and simultaneously LFPs recording was performed in two different cortical areas of primary somatosensory (S1) or visual (V1) cortex. LZC and the amplitude of slow waves were computed during different periods of VNS. We found that the LZC index during VNS period was significantly higher in both of the cortical areas of S1 and V1. Slow-wave activity decreased during VNS in S1, while there was no significant change in V1. Our findings showed that VNS can augment the consciousness level, and LZC index is a more sensitive parameter for detecting the level of consciousness.
Keywords: Brain-body interaction; Consciousness; Vagus nerve stimulation; Visceral afferent.
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