" I'm certainly not an expert, but I can read it well enough to understand that Terri's brain is in very bad shape.
I wouldn't expect anyone to make a firm diagnosis based on one scan, but on the other hand the scan is pretty clear in the fact that Terri's brain injury is more significant that some want to accept."
Atrophy proves nothing. From the literature, it has been shown that cerebral atrophy on CT does not necessarily correlate with cognitive dysfunction.
National Library of Medicine:
"What was expected to be the most heated discussion during the meeting--that on the role of the CT scan ....with the experts agreeing such a technique could be valuable in ruling out certain treatable causes of dementia but
could not give a definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease or multi-farct dementia."
It has also agreed that when used with elderly patients, the CT scan cannot differentiate between pathological brain atrophy and "normal" brain atrophy.
In addition, Dr. Robert Katzman of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, and Dr. Ernest Gruenberg of Johns Hopkins University,
both argued that there is no direct correlation between cerebral atrophy and cognitive dysfunction.
Dr. Gruenberg noted that autopsied brains of severely demented persons sometimes show little atrophy and vice versa.
Dr. Katzman pointed out that the hallmark of senile dementia of the Alzheimer's type is pathological change in the neurons, not atrophy of the brain."
Archives of Neurology :
" Atrophic changes on CT scans, however, were not necessarily correlated with any intellectual dysfunction, or only weakly so, independent of age."