A man who suffered a severe traumatic accident in 2003, and has been in a ‘zero-awareness’ state ever since, has responded to
doctors with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers to questions by wilfully changing his brain activity. Doctors were astonished to find this amount of brain activity in a patient, who was deemed far from complete recovery, leave alone the possibility of thought.
In a study published in The New England Journal Of Medicine, British and Belgian researchers used a brain scanner called functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the change in patterns of brain activity, when the man was asked simple questions.
The results completely changed the doctors’ earlier stance that labelled the patient ‘brain dead’ and provided a glimmer of hope to better understand and treat patients with severe brain injury.
“We were astonished when we saw the results of the patient’s scan and that he was able to correctly answer the questions that were asked by simply changing his thoughts,” said Adrian Owen, co-author of the study from the Medical Research Council. “Not only did these scans tell us that the patient was not in a vegetative state but, more importantly, for the first time in five years it provided the patient with a way of communicating his thoughts to the outside world.”
The present study is adding fuel to the ongoing moral and ethical debates on when doctors and families of perpetually vegetative state (PVS) patients should pull the plug on life support machines – as well as the issue of assisted suicide if a PVS patient can indeed communicate his wish to live or die.
Although the same team tested 22 other PVS patients and concluded that at least one in five are able to communicate, other medical professionals are not completely convinced about the ability of such patients to thoroughly communicate their wishes.
Speaking to Daily News, Prof. Geraint Rees, Director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London said: “As a clinician, it would be important to satisfy oneself that the individual that you are communicating with is competent to make those decisions. At the moment it is premature to conclude that the individual able to answer five out of six yes/no questions is fully conscious like you or I.”