Communicate by thought: A hope for patients

The achievement of a medical team, managed to contact a man who believed in vegetative state, could help avoid future errors in diagnosis, better care for patients but also to avoid the aggressive treatment.

The result of this research team from the Universities of Cambridge in Great Britain and Liege in Belgium, was published in the latest edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.

A man seen for five years as being in vegetative state was able to answer "yes" and "no", only by his thoughts, to doctors using magnetic resonance imaging functional.

This discovery will "change the care of the patient, refine the diagnosis and help to avoid aggressive treatment," said the neuropsychologist Belgian Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse, one of the researchers involved in the work.

Since a car accident five years ago, the patient, aged 22, had been regarded as being in a vegetative state, that is to say he did not meet any external stimulus.

When the team of researchers has examined the patient, "we realized he was not in a vegetative state. There were small signs of consciousness. But we could not communicate with him," recalls Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse.

Before the experiment the researchers had recorded the brain activity of other people while asking them questions which required simple "yes" or "no" answers.

Then the specialists put the patient in an MRI (imaging device, magnetic resonance) while asking questions. And they got the response by comparing his brain activity with the records of "yes" or "no" activities.

Today, the young man returned home. The success of researchers to communicate with him did not revolutionize his life, but he will have access to more appropriate care, such as incentive programs, which can sometimes improve ability to communicate with people.

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