Word: comas
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Three years ago, Dr Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liege in Belgium, examined a comatose 43-year-old Belgian patient, Rom Houben, who for the past 23 years had been assumed by medical professionals to be brain dead. Laureys, who runs a coma study group specializing in such cases, performed sensitive clinical and imaging tests on Houben and made a startling discovery: the former engineering student who suffered a brain injury in a car accident in 1983 was not in a vegetative state at all. (See the top 10 comas...
...past week, Houben's case has raised numerous questions. How common are such diagnostic mistakes? How can they be prevented? Is Houben's communication method really accurate? In the still-evolving field of coma studies, where scientists probe the twilight at the cusp of consciousness, it seems there are few clear answers. (See the year in health from...
...Houben's case come to light? Over the past five years, Laureys and others have studied brain-injury patients classified as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). In such states, patients awake from a coma and return to a normal sleep cycle, but show no signs of awareness or consciousness. Laureys and others have found that around 40% of such patients are misdiagnosed. Most of these misdiagnosed patients fall under a classification called "minimally conscious," in which they show subtle but consistent signs of awareness. (The "minimally conscious" classification was only recognized in 2002 thanks to the work...
Here's hoping you avoided the food coma: you'll need your wits about you for Black Friday. The traditional day-after-Thanksgiving shopping bonanza has become a full-contact sport, with crazed shoppers determined to find the best deals, sometimes with tragic results. In last year's frenzy, a worker at a New York Walmart was trampled to death when the store opened its doors; two shoppers were shot in a dispute at a Toys "R" Us in California. The ensuing safety concerns may have prompted some shoppers to think twice, but retailers still expect a bonanza: the weekend...
What a surprise it must have been when Major Nidal Malik Hasan woke up from his coma to find himself not in paradise but in Brooke Army Medical Center, deep in the heart of Texas, under security so tight that there were armed guards patrolling both the intensive-care unit and checkpoints at the nearest freeway off-ramp. This was not the finalé he had scripted when he gave away all his earthly goods - his desk lamp and air mattress, his frozen broccoli and spinach, his copies of the Koran. He had told his imam he was planning...