Play tennis during a coma

Brain scans a 23-year-old woman, who suffered an injury due to a traffic accident and has been in a coma for 5 months, the researchers found that patients were still able to perceive whether they were in a state of plant life.

A picture of the patient's brain (right column) lights up in the same brain region of a healthy person (left column) when asked to do something similar. Dr. Adrian Owen of Cambridge University and colleagues in England and Belgium used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the patient's brain activity. They asked her to imagine herself playing tennis and visiting rooms in her house, starting from the front door.

After examining brain function, the team found that when asked to do something, the patient's brain reacted similarly to that in normal people.

This result proves that the patient is still able to hear, understand and react by brain activity, not by words or actions. However, the researchers note that not all patients with plant life are the same because traumatic brain injuries often recover faster than injuries caused by heart attacks or heart attacks. This study shows that there is a need to improve tomography techniques to properly assess the state of a comatose's brain.

THANH TRUC