What scanning techniques are revealing about vegetative patients.

Writing in the New Yorker, Jerome Groopman reports on surprising new research on the mental activity of patients who have been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. Patients who were unresponsive and did not make purposeful movements nonetheless had brain scans that were the same as those of normal volunteers. A man who had been in a minimally conscious state for 19 years began to speak and acquire new memories.

The research seems to challenge established diagnostic criteria as well as conventional wisdom about the mental activity and consciousness of people who had previously been believed to be beyond rehabilitation. It is not known whether the brain-scan research will be able to predict a patient’s prospects for improvement.

The article closes with the text of an email from a Kate Bainbridge, a formerly vegetative patient who was among those studied by British neuroscientist Adrian Owen.

“Most scans show what is wrong with your brain, which doctors need to know,” Bainbridge wrote to me in an e-mail. “But Adrian Owen’s scans show what is working. I say they found parts of my brain were working. It really scares me to think what might have happened to me if I had not had the scans. They show people it was worth carrying on even though my body was unresponsive.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 7:45 am and is filed under brain damage, medicine, research news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post