|
 A BBC News article dated February 3, 2010 reported findings of a study that suggests that a small percentage of people in a “vegetative” state may in fact be able to respond to questions using brain imaging technology.
In 2006, researchers in Britain and Belgium found that they were able to detect awareness in four of 23 patients diagnosed to be in a “vegetative state”, by asking patients to imagine playing tennis. In these four patients and in healthy volunteers, imagining playing tennis stimulated activity in one part of the brain, which researchers could view thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology.
Researchers were able to communicate with one patient by asking him to think of playing tennis when he wanted to say “yes” and to think of being in his house when he wanted to say “no”. These thoughts activate different parts of the brain; one task deals with motor skills while the other deals with spatial skills. Researchers were able to see this patient’s responses to yes/no questions by looking to see which part of the brain was active.
These findings raise intriguing questions about what it means to be aware, and whether in the future, new technologies might allow us to communicate with at least a percentage of patients currently thought to have no awareness.
How Permanent is the “Vegetative State”?
One argument in favor of the use of euthanasia is that once people enter a “permanent vegetative state” they will not recover. While this may be true in many or even most cases, there are well-documented cases of at least partial recovery.
A 1994 article in the New England Journal of Medicine cited four cases where a patient recovered after more than a year in a “vegetative” state. While recovery was not considered complete (the patients had severe or moderate disabilities), the fact that some people do recover even after extraordinarily long periods of time shows that a “permanent vegetative state” is not always permanent.
|
