British Researchers See Normal Brain Activity in Another "PVS" Patient

Life News ^ | 8/14/07 | Steven Ertelt

[wagglebee]

London, England (LifeNews.com) -- British researchers say that scans of the brain activity of a disabled woman there show normal levels despite a diagnosis from doctors that she is supposedly in a persistent vegetative state. This is the second time the research have found normal brain activity in a PVS patient.

Adrian Owen and other scientists at Cambridge University reported on Monday about the findings of their new study, which shows that researchers may be able to predict which comatose patients can recover.

Owen and his team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at the activity in the patient's brain and asked the female patient to imagine she was walking through her home. After the request, her brain lit up with activity in the parts of the brain expected to function.

The Archives of Neurology journal article said the patient's brain showed about the same activity as healthy people.

Owen and his colleagues scanned the brains of 10 other patients and got another positive response from a man in his 30s who had been severely beaten.

"We put him in the scanner and we had exactly the same responses," Owen told Reuters.

He told the news service that observers shouldn't make too much of the study -- whether it would have shown if Terri Schiavo or other disabled patients exhibited brain activity or could have recovered.

"We don't want to raise false hopes or make people think all minimally conscious patients are aware," he said.

Still he said that people who are more likely to recover, according to their research, are patients like Terri who suffered from a lack of oxygen to the brain.

This is the second time the researchers showed significant brain activity in a PVS patient.

Last fall, they said a 23 year-old British woman in a so-called "vegetative state" after she was hurt in an automobile accident a year ago showed normal brain levels. Although the unnamed woman can't move or speak, she has responded to sentences spoken to her and even played an imaginary game of tennis in her head.

Owen reported on Monday that the woman is showing improvement and possibly confirming that the brain levels recorded earlier were a precursor to her recovery.

"About six months after we scanned her, she started to show the earliest signs of improvement," he told Reuters. "She is now in a minimally conscious state. She is able to produce responses occasionally but not consistently."

[wagglebee]

This woman had brain activity, so did another woman last fall and of the ten others they tested, one showed brain activity -- that hardly sounds like further treatment would be "futile."

[wagglebee]

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[RS]

“”We don’t want to raise false hopes or make people think all minimally conscious patients are aware,” he said. “

Strange statement ... I thought he was working with PVS patients ?

[em2vn]

PVS is sometimes caused if a person is placed on a ventilator and the oxygen isn’t warmed to body temperature.

[supercat]

"We don't want to raise false hopes or make people think all minimally conscious patients are aware," he said.

Obviously not all minimally-concious patients are aware, but suppose one adapts the following protocol:

1. Generate a list of twenty statements, twenty of which would be expected to yield one type of reaction, and twenty of which would be expected to yield a different type of reaction. All statements should be of similar length. Produce audio recordings of all twenty statements, spoken similarly.
2. Next, play the statements, in random order, to the patient while recording physiological responses (including those from the FMRI).
3. Show the recorded responses to an examiner who does not know in which order the statements were read, and ask the examiner to sort the responses into the two types.

If the examiner is able to sort the responses mostly correctly, that would suggest that the patient is processing the statements in a manner that separates them; if the statements would require awareness to distinguish the two groups, a successful division by the examiner would prove awareness. Note that 'wishful thinking' on the part of the examiner would be a non-issue. An examiner, no matter how optimistic, would not be able to separate out the two types of statements unless the patient was able to do so.

[fetal heart beats by 21st day]

Many people have woken up from so-called PVS.

btw, Is it true that only one machine,a PET machine, can actually rule out brain activity for certain?

[Sun]

I wish people would stop thinking that doctors, or medical science, is infallible. We are always learning.

[angryoldfatman]

"We don't want to raise false hopes or make people think all minimally conscious patients are aware," he said.

Does this guy actually hear what he says?

Now the propagandists are trying to tell us that "conscious" and "aware" aren't synonyms. :rolleyes:

[8mmMauser]

Pinged from Terri Dailies

8mm

[jy22077]

Terri never got fMRI. Michael claimed it was because she had the implant and she would have travel to possibility New York. These were obviously cop out issues.

There was a rush to kill Terri Schiavo.