Vegetative state doesn't mean brain death

Some patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state may be fully aware of what's going on around him, a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests.

The study led by researchers in England and Belgium found four of 23 vegetative patients had signs of consciousness on brain-imaging tests.

For the study, Adrian M. Owen, coauthor, at the Medical Research Council in the U.K. and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI to test 54 patients with severe brain injury and see if they could think.

Patients were placed in a MRI scanner and asked to imagine playing tennis, which would activate the part of the brain associated with movement if the patients responded and asked to imagine walking on familiar city sweets, which would activate the part of the brain linked to spatial navigation if they were responsive.

Based on the test results, the researchers determined four out of 23 patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state actually answered the questions the researchers asked just like the health control subjects did.

They further tested the patients asking them if they had brothers.  The study subjects were asked to imagine playing tennis if the answer was yes and to imagine walking around their houses if the answer was no.

The four vegetative patients responded to the question correctly.

Forty percent of patients who suffered severe brain injury were misdiagnosed, according to the researchers and this misdiagnoses could lead to a wrongful termination of a patient's life.

By Jimmy Downs