NEW STUDY REVEALS SOME BRAIN ACTIVITY IN PEOPLE IN "VEGETATIVE" STATE FROM TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY
New research suggests that standard tests to determine brain activity may overlook patients who have some consciousness. The new test used by researchers in Britain and Belgium is called a functional MRI. The results of their study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The researchers emphasized that only a few of the patients they tested showed evidence of mental awareness. Further, it is not clear to what degree the patients are conscious.
Researchers noted that the positive signals appeared only in people with traumatic brain injury. Those whose brain injuries resulted from oxygen deprivation did not show consciousness.
To test the patients in the study, researchers asked vegetative and minimally conscious persons to imagine two situations. One scenario involved standing on a tennis court hitting a ball to an instructor and the other was navigating familiar streets or walking from room to room in their homes. In some of the patients, the brain scan used by researchers, a functional MRI, showed different patterns of brain activity for each scenario.
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