Woman in vegetative state uses thought to communicate

[OpenMind]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... w_08092006





Woman in vegetative state uses thought to communicate

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

(Filed: 08/09/2006)

An unconscious and outwardly unresponsive woman with serious brain damage has been able to communicate by the power of her thoughts alone.



A remarkable brain scan experiment has for the first time revealed a glimmer of awareness and consciousness in a person that has been diagnosed by doctors as being vegetative.

The method not only suggests that the crash victim could play tennis in her head when asked, and was really listening when her family talked to her at her bedside, but could in theory be developed to help her communicate with the outside world, since other research has shown how brain scanners can be adapted to control computers.

The study, published today in Science, reveals the extraordinary power of brain scanners to diagnose the extent of brain damage, showing that one day they will be a crucial method to see how much the mind has been harmed as a result.

"It's a spectacular result," said Dr Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist undertaking similar research at Columbia University, New York, with functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI.

But it is also bound to reopen the debate about what we mean by the vegetative state, one of the least understood and most ethically troublesome conditions in modern medicine.

The term describes a unique disorder in which patients who emerge from coma – when they look asleep – appear to be awake. Some show no signs of awareness and are unresponsive, save basic reflexes. The term is also distinct from patients who are deemed "minimally conscious", when they are partly functional.

The study was undertaken in Cambridge five months after the 23-year-old British woman emerged from a coma by a team led by Dr Adrian Owen, of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. The team claims that the unnamed woman was aware of what was being said to her and that her mind could react.

The "startling results" confirm that, despite the diagnosis of vegetative state, "this patient retained the ability to understand spoken commands and to respond to them through her brain activity, rather than through speech or movement", said Dr Owen. "This research does help us to learn more about how the brain deals with a catastrophic injury and the more information that we can gather about this complex condition, the better equipped we will be to make decisions about the clinical management of patients who are in a vegetative state."

Dr Steven Laureys, in Liege, Belgium, who collaborated in the work, said that the method detected the patient was aware six months before the first hints came from a standard test, when she began to be able to track her image in the mirror – usually taken as the first sign of consciousness.

However, not everyone is convinced by today's work. Prof Paul Matthews, of the University of Oxford, said: "Contrary to the claim of the authors, the observations do not establish either that the patient made a 'decision to co-operate' or that she had self-awareness."

The Science team is also uneasy about how the families of vegetative patients will react to the discovery that a patient who is physically unresponsive and fulfils all the criteria for a diagnosis of vegetative state could possibly have an inner mental life.

Dr Laureys stressed that it is important not to generalise from this one patient to all vegetative-state patients. Unlike when the entire brain is starved of oxygen, the ability to recover from this kind of local brain damage, caused by a road traffic accident some months ago, is much higher.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2006.

[zinkyusa]

There you go OM gonna drag us all out of our b&w worlds and think again...

[OpenMind]

zinkyusa wrote: There you go OM gonna drag us all out of our b&w worlds and think again...


Oh, yeah.:wah:

[zinkyusa]

OpenMind wrote: Oh, yeah.:wah:


Fortunately my brain is very flat and it is difficult to detect any signs of my normal activities. I don't think I need to worry about falling into this situation. Any degrades and my brain activity will become undetectable:wah:

[OpenMind]

zinkyusa wrote: Fortunately my brain is very flat and it is difficult to detect any signs of my normal activities. I don't think I need to worry about falling into this situation. Any degrades and my brain activity will become undetectable:wah:


Hah! So it was you the article was referring to.:sneaky:

[OpenMind]

zinkyusa wrote:

Any degrades and my brain activity will become undetectable:wah:




Hamster says, Well it is Friday....so we will allow it for today.. :wah:.

That's very kind of Hamster. Back to the operating room tomorrow though.:sneaky: