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To say that this needs further study is the understatment of the century....
WASHINGTON (AP) --Advanced brain scanning uncovered startling signs of awareness in a woman in a vegetative state, British scientists reported Thursday --a finding that complicates one of medicine's ethical minefields.
The work is sure to elicit pleas from families desperate to know if loved ones deemed beyond medical help have brain activity that doctors don't suspect. "Can he or she hear and understand me?'' is a universal question.
It's far too soon to raise hopes, the British researchers and U.S. brain specialists stress. There's no way to know if this 23-year-old woman, brain-damaged over a year ago, will recover, and therefore if her brain activity meant anything medically. Her brain injury may not be typical of patients in a vegetative state.
Scientists don't even agree on whether the woman had some real awareness --she seemed to follow, mentally, certain commands --or if her brain was responding more automatically to speech.
"This is just one patient. The result in one patient does not tell us whether any other patient will show similar results, nor whether this result will have any bearing on her,'' cautioned neuroscientist Adrian Owen of Britain's Medical Research Council. He led the novel brain-scanning experiment, reported in the journal Science.
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How could they tell? First, they checked that she could process speech. Upon being told "there was milk and sugar in the coffee,'' the fMRI showed brain regions reacting the same in the woman and in healthy volunteers.
Then came the big test. Owen told the woman to perform a mental task --to imagine herself playing tennis and walking through her house. Motor-control regions of her brain lit up like they did in the healthy people he compared with her.
"There is no other explanation for this than that she has intentionally decided to involve herself in the study and do what we asked when we asked,'' Owen said in an interview.
The work is sure to elicit pleas from families desperate to know if loved ones deemed beyond medical help have brain activity that doctors don't suspect. "Can he or she hear and understand me?'' is a universal question.
It's far too soon to raise hopes, the British researchers and U.S. brain specialists stress. There's no way to know if this 23-year-old woman, brain-damaged over a year ago, will recover, and therefore if her brain activity meant anything medically. Her brain injury may not be typical of patients in a vegetative state.
Scientists don't even agree on whether the woman had some real awareness --she seemed to follow, mentally, certain commands --or if her brain was responding more automatically to speech.
"This is just one patient. The result in one patient does not tell us whether any other patient will show similar results, nor whether this result will have any bearing on her,'' cautioned neuroscientist Adrian Owen of Britain's Medical Research Council. He led the novel brain-scanning experiment, reported in the journal Science.
>
>
How could they tell? First, they checked that she could process speech. Upon being told "there was milk and sugar in the coffee,'' the fMRI showed brain regions reacting the same in the woman and in healthy volunteers.
Then came the big test. Owen told the woman to perform a mental task --to imagine herself playing tennis and walking through her house. Motor-control regions of her brain lit up like they did in the healthy people he compared with her.
"There is no other explanation for this than that she has intentionally decided to involve herself in the study and do what we asked when we asked,'' Owen said in an interview.
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