Anyone who has ever experienced the nightmare of having a loved one in a coma knows how excruciatingly painful it can be. The person you love is still alive but completely incapable of communicating.
New research from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) may bring new hope for the recovery of coma patients.
Awakening comatose patients: a long battle
Research into methods to “bring back” comatose patients managed to awaken a patient for the first time in 2016. The scientist, Martin Monti, it's the same.
At the time, however, Monti believed he had been "a bit lucky". Now, Monti and his team have achieved the same result with two patients in a coma, with a long-term “minimally conscious state”.
“This new result is much more significant, because these chronic patients were much less likely to recover spontaneously than the acute patient we treated in 2016,” Monti says.
Any recovery typically occurs slowly over several months and more typically years, not days and weeks as we show today.
Martin Monti, professor of psychology and neurosurgery at UCLA and senior co-author of the new study.
“It is very unlikely that such findings are simply due to spontaneous recovery.”
Treatment for patients in a coma consists of a technique called low intensity focused ultrasound.
Ultrasound has been used in everything from preventing dementia to eradicating cancer cells. This new approach uses sound stimulation to excite neurons in the thalamus of comatose patients, and is proving very powerful.
The results
Out of three comatose patients who received treatment, two had positive results.
It should be noted that patients who responded well were not able to function exactly as their pre-clinical state; however, they were able to respond to external stimuli and perform small tasks. Nodding, dropping and catching a ball, writing with a pen on paper, recognizing objects.
Both comatose patients were also able to understand speech, a sign of fundamental progress.
“What is notable is that both patients showed significant responses within a few days of surgery,” Monti said.
“This is what we hoped for, but it's amazing to see it with your own eyes. Seeing two of our three patients who had been in a coma improve very significantly within a few days of treatment is an extremely promising result."
The new method of awakening comatose patients has been described as “Jumpstarting”.
