The results of that study, released Thursday, show that when patients heard unfamiliar voices, brain scans showed little activity, but when they heard close relatives calling out their names or talking, the scans lit up. Pape's team also asked the families to record stories loved ones would recognize and play them repeatedly for a month and a half using headphones.
The stories were played for eight of the patients, including Godfrey. The other seven only heard silence.
The eight patients that heard the stories recovered significantly faster. After three months, Godfrey came out of his coma severely disabled, but cognitively intact.
Egnor describes: persistent vegetative state a condition of profound nonresponsiveness in the wakeful state caused by brain damage at whatever level and characterized by a nonfunctioning cerebral cortex, the absence of any discernible adaptive response to the external environment, akinesia, mutism, and inability to signal; the electroencephalogram may be isoelectric or show abnormal activity.
Vegetative states raise ethical questions regarding appropriate care, use of resources, and allowing a patient to die. Retrieved April 14 via The Medical Dictionary. And that question was first addressed rigorously by a neuroscientist named Adrian Owen at Cambridge in England back about fifteen years ago.
A functional MRI test looks at changes in blood flow in the brain that we believe correspond to activation of parts of the brain. So he put her in the machine and he put headphones on her and he asked her to think about things. Even though she had massive brain damage, there were patterns of activation. So he then took fifteen normal volunteers, put them in the machine, and asked them the same questions.
And her patterns of activation were identical to theirs. So he said, well, to a first approximation, it looks like she can think just like they can think. So it made no sense. So he showed that the only time she had activation in her brain was when what was asked of her made sense.
And her activation was completely indistinguishable from the activation of completely conscious people. So he concluded that she was able to understand and think about things that he was asking her to understand and think about, even though she was in the deepest level of coma. His research has been repeated by a number of other laboratories on many, many patients with persistent vegetative state.
See also Acquired Brain Injury , Stroke. It can be caused by a number of factors — traumatic injuries like a car crash , intoxication or overdose, diseases, neurological injuries such as stroke, and many other factors. Treatment will vary a lot depending on the cause of the coma, and your stage of recovery. The cause will also impact how long it lasts, if you wake up, and if you have any long-term effects after waking up.
Coma is a state of unconsciousness in which a patient does not react with the surrounding environment. Someone who is in a coma is unconscious and has minimal brain activity. It is not possible to wake a coma patient using physical or auditory stimulation.
Additionally a person in a coma fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light, or sound; lacks a normal sleep-wake cycle and, does not initiate voluntary actions, being unable to consciously feel, speak, hear, or move. Someone in a coma will also have very reduced basic reflexes such as coughing and swallowing. They may be able to breathe on their own, although some people require a machine to help them breathe.
Over time, the person may start to gradually regain consciousness and become more aware. Some people will wake up after a few weeks, while others may go into a vegetative state or minimally conscious state. Patients can exhibit different levels of unconsciousness and unresponsiveness depending on which brain regions have been damaged and how much or how little of the brain is functioning.
In some instances, coma may be deliberately induced using pharmaceutical agents in order to preserve higher brain functions following brain trauma, or to save the patient from extreme pain during healing of injuries or diseases.
All of these factors will influence the path through treatment and recovery, which is detailed below. Initial treatment will depend on the cause of the coma and will be directed at preventing further damage to the brain. In the short term, a person will normally be looked after in an intensive care unit ICU.
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