nonresponsive

Nonresponsive is an adjective describing someone or something that does not respond or is unable to respond to stimuli, questions, or inputs. It is used across various fields to denote lack of expected response in a given context.

In medicine and critical care, nonresponsive commonly refers to a patient who does not respond to therapeutic interventions or stimuli. A nonresponsive patient may be unconscious or unresponsive to commands, light, or pain. The term appears in discussions of stroke, trauma, cardiac arrest, and assessments of consciousness. Clinicians differentiate nonresponse to treatment (treatment failure) from transient states of reduced responsiveness caused by anesthesia, sedation, or metabolic disturbance. In some contexts, unresponsive is used interchangeably with nonresponsive.

In pharmacology and physiology, a drug or treatment is described as nonresponsive when it fails to produce the expected effect in a given patient, potentially due to pharmacokinetic factors, pharmacodynamic tolerance, receptor desensitization, or genetic variation.

In information technology and consumer devices, nonresponsive describes systems or interfaces that fail to respond to user input, commands, or network requests, often due to software faults, resource exhaustion, or connectivity issues.

Nonresponse in research denotes failure to obtain usable data from a subject or unit, which can introduce bias. Understanding whether nonresponse reflects reversible factors or irreversible conditions is essential for clinical decision making and resource allocation.