A team of scientists from the UK and Belgium has shown that some vegetative patients are awake and able to communicate , despite the fact that their brain damage prevents them from being conscious. The research has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine .
For the experiment, the scientists asked a group of healthy volunteers and a group of coma patients to imagine themselves playing tennis, a thought that stimulates activity in the premotor cerebral cortex. In all the volunteers, when imagining themselves practicing sports, the scanner (functional magnetic resonance imaging) showed the movement of this part of the brain. In the case of patients, it occurred only in 4 of the 23 cases.
In addition, a 29-year-old Belgian patient in a vegetative state for 7 years was able to correctly answer several simple autobiographical questions that scientists asked him. To make the "conversation" possible, they asked the patient to imagine some motor activity, such as playing tennis, to answer with "yes", and to imagine a space, for example the streets of a city, to refer to "no", two thoughts that the scanner easily distinguishes. "Perhaps now we can ask them if they are in pain and prescribe painkillers , or find out what their emotional state is," said Adrian Owen of the British Medical Research Institute (MRC), who has participated in the research.
