Would this be helpful in diagnosing locked-in patients before your doctor tells you it is hopeless to recover? You are going to have to hope your doctor and hospital have a correct protocol for this even though they have no protocols for any other stroke rehabilitation items. Good luck with that.
http://dgnews.docguide.com/brain-scans-may-help-predict-recovery-coma?
Brain scans of people in a coma may help predict who will regain
consciousness, according to a study published in the November 11, 2015,
online issue of the journal Neurology.
The study looked at connections between areas of the brain that play a
role in regulating consciousness. For the study, 27 people in a coma
with severe brain injuries were compared with 14 healthy people of the
same age. All of the participants had functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) scans taken of their brains.
For those in a coma, the scans were conducted after any sedative
drugs were out of their systems. Three months after their injuries, 4 of
the people with coma had recovered consciousness. The others remained
in a minimally conscious state or a vegetative state at 3 months.
All of the comatose people had significant disruption in the
connections between brain areas and the posterior cingulate cortex.
These changes were the same whether the brain injury was due to trauma
or to lack of oxygen, such as from cardiac arrest.
The researchers found that the coordination of activity between the
posterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex was
significantly different between those who went on to recover from the
coma and those who remained in a minimally conscious state or a
vegetative state. The coordination between the 2 brain areas was the
same for the healthy participants and those who regained consciousness.
Stein Silva, MD, French National Research Institute, INSERM U825,
Toulouse, France, said that more research is needed before these results
can be used to guide decisions about people in comas.
“We need to do more studies with larger numbers of patients to
substantiate these results, but the findings are promising,” said Dr.
Silva. “We could be able to predict better who is more likely to recover
from a coma and eventually develop innovative networks-based
personalised treatments for people with brain injuries.”
SOURCE: American Academy of Neurology
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