In news that made headlines worldwide and stirred memories of the Terri Schiavo case, a woman thought to be in a persistent vegetative state showed evidence of awareness of herself and her environment in response to verbal commands, said English and Belgian researchers.
As Adrian M. Owen, Ph.D., and colleagues at Cambridge University and the University of Liege in Belgium reported in the Sept. 8 issue of Science, they used functional MRI to evaluate a 23-year-old woman's brain activity, if any, during the presentation of simple spoken sentences. The scans were compared with others taken when the patient was presented with acoustically-matched noise sequences.
The woman had been unresponsive since emerging from a coma after a traffic accident and met all the criteria for a persistent vegetative state. When she was presented with spoken sentences she had increased activity in speech comprehension centers in the brain, as seen on functional MRI. When she was asked to imagine herself playing tennis and walking through the rooms of her house, brain areas governing visiospatial and motor function lit up on the imaging screen, in patterns similar to those seen in normal volunteers, the investigators reported.
It's a spectacular result," said neurologist Nicholas D. Schiff, M.D., of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, in a news article in the same issue of Science. It's not clear, however, whether the results could be reproduced in other patients diagnosed as being in persistent vegetative states, Dr. Schiff said.
