New research found that brain scans can detect consciousness in some patients with brain injury who are unresponsive.
In the study, 241 participants with severe brain injury who do not respond when given a simple instruction were assessed with functional MRI , electroencephalography , or both tests, while hearing instructions, such as 'imagine opening and closing your hand.' Their brain responses showed that 25 percent of participants repeatedly followed this instruction covertly over minutes.
"Some patients with severe brain injury do not appear to be processing their external world. However, when they are assessed with advanced techniques such as task-based fMRI and EEG, we can detect brain activity that suggests otherwise," said lead study author Yelena Bodien, PhD, an investigator for the Spaulding-Harvard Traumatic Brain Injury Model Systems and Massachusetts General Hospital's Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery.
In addition to studying the 241 participants who did not respond to simple instructions, the research included 112 participants who did respond to simple instructions at the bedside. This latter group would be expected to perform well on the fMRI and EEG tests, but, in 62 percent of those participants, researchers did not detect brain responses suggesting they were covertly following instructions.
One limitation of the study was that the testing was not standardized; each of the study sites tested patients in their own way, creating variability within the data. In addition, many participants were enrolled because family members heard about the study and reached out to researchers. This recruitment approach limits the researchers' ability to determine the global prevalence of cognitive motor dissociation.
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