NORWOOD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aspect Medical Systems (NASDAQ: ASPM), the global market leader in brain monitoring technology, commented today on the results from a prospective study of the potential of the Bispectral Index™ (BIS™) to reduce the risk of anesthesia awareness. The study, published in the March 13 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), evaluated a patient population considered to be at high risk for anesthesia awareness, or inadvertent waking during surgery. Researchers compared BIS-guided anesthesia care with a protocol based on end-tidal anesthetic gas (ETAG) guided care and found a similar occurrence of awareness in the two groups. The authors concluded that no benefit of BIS monitoring was demonstrated. The results of the BIS-guided care group in the study were consistent with findings from the BIS-guided care group from the B-Aware study published in The Lancet in May 2004. The low incidence measured in the NEJM study represents an 80 percent reduction from the expected rate of awareness in these patients as documented in numerous studies.
