New Tool Helps You Fight for Your Loved One
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| Portable EEG |
A research team has recently found that 43% of diagnoses have been wrong! Families may now have a tool that will enable them to dispute what they believe is an inaccurate diagnosis that their loved one is in a "vegetative state" - a Portable EEG Machine.
Family members and friends of a loved one who is locked in a vegetative state (VS) and deemed by medical professionals to be awake but not aware now have recourse to a new brainwave-reading technology that may tell a story different from the doctor's diagnosis.
Researchers from the Brain and Mind Institute at The University of Western Ontario unveiled a portable electroencephalography (EEG) machine that can simply and cost-effectively assess the consciousness of VS patients in their own bedroom.
Damian Cruse, lead writer for the research team, says that the new brainwave scanning technology is relatively cheap, portable, and widely available.
This means that we can now go out into the community and visit patients in their residential care homes or hospitals and provide a more accurate diagnosis than was previously possible," he said in a press release.
The team of researchers found that despite rigorous clinical assessment, up to 43% of VS patients have been misclassified.
Adrian Owen, one of the team's members who is a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at Western's Centre for Brain and Mind, has recently proved that a significant minority of "vegetative" patients are in fact consciously aware and, in some cases, can even communicate with the outside world using brain-imaging technologies.
It's astonishing," said Owen in a press release. "In some of these cases, patients who seemed to be entirely unresponsive to the outside world were able to signal that they were, in fact, conscious by changing their patterns of brain activity - sometimes hundreds of times."
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2012 Christian Nature
