by Playfuls Staff |
8th September 2006
British researchers say they have been able to use brain imaging to find signs of consciousness in a woman who has been unresponsive since an auto crash.[more]
The team -- led by Dr. Adrian Owen at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge -- compared the woman's responses to sentences spoken to her, with those of healthy volunteers. Researchers, for example, asked her to imagine playing tennis -- and discovered activity in the part of the brain that governs psychomotor activity.
"If you put her scans together with (those of) the other 12 volunteers tested you cannot tell which is the patient's," Owen told The New York Times.
Neurologists cautioned that the findings with one patient should not be generalized. The patient was injured less than a year ago and had shown some signs of moving out of a vegetative state.
Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose condition set off a national debate, had been in a vegetative state for 15 years. She had also suffered massive loss of oxygen, likely to be more damaging than a traumatic injury.
