Eideard

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A Belgian man who stunned the world last year by apparently communicating after 23 years in a coma cannot in fact do so, researchers say.

The doctor who believed that Rom Houben was communicating through a facilitator now says the method does not work.

Dr Steven Laureys told the BBC: “The story of Rom is about the diagnosis of consciousness, not communication…”

Dr Laureys, a neurologist at Liege University Hospital in Belgium, had earlier established that Mr Houben, was more conscious than doctors had previously thought – and that is still thought to be the case.

But he also believed that his interaction with the speech therapist was genuine. Following further study, however, Dr Laureys says the method does not work.

He told the BBC that a series of tests on a group of coma patients, including Mr Houben, had concluded that the method was after all false…

“It’s like using an Ouija board,” Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, told Associated Press…

“I hope Rom and his family will stay as an example” of how hard it is to pick up the signs of consciousness, Dr Laureys told the Associated Press. “Even when we know that patients are conscious, we don’t know if there is pain or suffering or what they are feeling.”

First, credit Dr. Laurys for the integrity to challenge his initial conclusions. Introducing sophisticated testing proved his hopes incorrect – and he’s offered that updated information to the medical community and the world at large.

Finally, understand that science always demands reproducible, verifiable results before data is accepted as fact. There is significant difference between this process and the “political” skepticism in fashion among those usually one step removed from creationism in their anti-science ideology.

Patient answers five yes-or-no questions using his mind

Some people thought to be in a vegetative state–a persistent lack of awareness following brain injury–may be more aware than previously thought, even able to communicate, according to new research… published today in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

In 2006, Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Cambridge, England, and colleagues published a startling discovery. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, an indirect measure of brain activity, revealed that a patient who showed no outward signs of awareness several months after a car accident could mentally respond to a complex series of commands in much the same way a healthy person could….

In the current study, patients diagnosed as either vegetative or minimally conscious were asked to either imagine playing tennis–a motor task–or to imagine walking through the streets of a familiar city or their home–a spatial task. In healthy people, each of these tasks activates a characteristic part of the brain, allowing scientists to determine just from the brain scan which of the two situations the person is visualizing. The task is also cognitively complex: the patient must comprehend the command, remember it during the test, and then carry out the visualization.

The researchers found that five of 54 patients presumed to be in a vegetative state were able to willfully control their brain activity…

The team went on to show that in one patient, a 22-year-old man who had been diagnosed as vegetative after a car accident five years prior, this imagery task could be used to communicate. The patient was instructed to imagine playing tennis if the answer to a question was yes, and to imagine his house if the answer was no. He was able to answer five of six questions, and answered them all correctly. Scientists did not know the answer to the questions prior to the test, confirming them later with the patient’s mother. For the last question, rather than giving an incorrect answer, he showed no brain activity at all. Researchers say he might have fallen asleep, lapsed out of consciousness, or chosen not to answer.

Not startling, to me, but riveting, yes. It should prove so to all but those medical personnel whose curiosity ends with receipt of payment.

The AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study is to be launched by the Human Consciousness Project of the University of Southampton – an international collaboration of scientists and physicians who have joined forces to study the human brain, consciousness and clinical death.

“Contrary to popular perception,” Dr Parnia explains, “death is not a specific moment. It is a process that begins when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working and the brain ceases functioning – a medical condition termed cardiac arrest, which from a biological viewpoint is synonymous with clinical death.

“During a cardiac arrest, all three criteria of death are present. There then follows a period of time, which may last from a few seconds to an hour or more, in which emergency medical efforts may succeed in restarting the heart and reversing the dying process. What people experience during this period of cardiac arrest provides a unique window of understanding into what we are all likely to experience during the dying process.”

A number of recent scientific studies carried out by independent researchers have demonstrated that 10-20 per cent of people who go through cardiac arrest and clinical death report lucid, well structured thought processes, reasoning, memories and sometimes detailed recall of events during their encounter with death.

Doctors will be studying the brain and consciousness during cardiac arrest. At the same time, they will record and compare perception vs. reality of so-called out of body experiences. No doubt this will upset several flavors of the mysterious ways and bible-thumping crowd.