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September 9, 2006

Doctors Find a Form of MRI Testing Can Help to Prove Signs of Life

by @ 12:02 am. Filed under The Truth Shall Set you Free!

Doctors have made a good find, that is sure to help people wondering if their non-mobile loved ones can actually hear them.

Woman in Vegetative State Shows Ability to Imagine

photo caption: Researchers are rethinking “vegetative state” after examining the brain activity of a seemingly unconscious U.K. woman.

Sept. 8, 2006 ? The 23-year-old patient lay in her hospital bed. She had suffered severe head injuries in a car crash and remained unconscious, or so it seemed.

After five months like this, her doctors in the United Kingdom concluded she was in a vegetative state.

But was she really “unaware” of what was happening around her?

Researchers at the University of Cambridge decided to find out more. So they put her into a magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scanner and measured specific brain activity, and then compared her brain activity to that of healthy volunteers. The journal Science published the findings this week.

What they found was, amazingly, the patient’s brain lit up on the MRI in the same areas that lit up on the volunteers.

This is simply an amazing find and great news. However I found the article made an error in trying to bring up the Terry Schiavo case.


Doctors warn that this is just one patient tested after only five months in a vegetative state. The findings do not necessarily mean that many other patients have similar awareness, especially those with the kind of massive brain damage suffered by Terry Schiavo, the Florida woman who died last year after her feeding tube was removed, after much legal controversy.

But the promise of this research is that it provides a new way to “test” which patients are in a vegetative state and which patients may actually be conscious and aware of the world around them.

Now we all can accept that maybe some people are in a vegetative state with no brain activity, but to bring up Terry Schiavo was a bit presumptive. Given this form of MRI related testing was never used on her and her parents were not able to perform some of the tests they desired. Also, some of the video from Terry’s parents showed she had more voluntary movement than some claimed.

Far be it from ABCNews to acknowledge that this kind of testing might have actually helped to prove Terry Schiavo was not in a vegetative state, to those who doubted.



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