WIKIMEDIA, JACOPO WERTHERSome brain injuries can leave patients awake but unresponsive with little hope of regaining consciousness. But the gold standard of bedside evaluations, including shining light in the person’s eyes among other tests, may miss some subtle brain activity in patients in vegetative states—those thought to have little to no chance of ever recovering. According to a study published this week (April 16) in The Lancet, positron emission tomography (PET) scans can help clinicians detect with greater certainty these faint hints of consciousness even in patients thought to be hopelessly vegetative.
“I think these patients are kind of neglected by both medicine and society,” Steven Laureys, senior of the study and the director of the Coma Science Group at the University of Liège in Belgium, told The New York Times. “Many of them don’t even see a medical doctor or a specialist for years. So I think it’s very important to ask the question, are they unconscious?”
Laureys and his colleagues compared the diagnostic ability of conventional bedside evaluations to both PET scans and to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of 126 patients with severe brain injuries. Forty-one of the test subjects had been declared vegetative, four were conscious but behaviorally unresponsive—having so-called “locked-in syndrome”—and 81 were considered “minimally conscious,” which meant that they displayed ...
