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Minimally Conscious

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Minimally Conscious

Stimulating Consciousness

Q&A with Martin Monti, Ph.D.

Determining if a brain-injured person is conscious can be difficult when that person cannot respond to your questions or show some outward sign. Dana Grantee Martin Monti is using targeted ultrasound to try to re-awaken dormant neurons.

Minimally Conscious

Searching for Signs of Consciousness

Q&A with Jan Claassen, M.D.

Dana grantee Jan Claassen uses EEG to detect patterns of brain activity in people in coma who don’t physically respond to voice commands that suggest some may have “covert consciousness.”
Minimally Conscious

The Struggle for Consciousness

Report from Neuroscience 2015

Connection to community and family should be a patient’s right, whether that person is fully conscious or minimally conscious, argued researcher Joseph Fins at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting.
Minimally Conscious

Disorders of Consciousness: Brain Death, Coma, and the Vegetative and Minimally Conscious States

Report on Progress

The authors present two scenarios on what are the disorders of consciousness: wakefulness, awareness, consciousness, coma, vegetative state, minimally conscious state, and brain death.
Minimally Conscious

Seeking the Neural Signature of Consciousness

Cambridge researchers using EEG find network activity differs among minimally conscious patients, and the possibility of predicting the potential to communicate even in non-responsive people.
Minimally Conscious

Waking Up from Coma: New Treatments, New Hope

Report on Progress

To understand how coma occurs, it is first necessary to have a basic understanding of how wakefulness is maintained in a normal brain. 
Minimally Conscious

The Ethics of Unconsciousness

As technology advances to the point where doctors can communicate to some extent with minimally conscious patients, what should they be asking? Simply, "Do you need another pillow?" Or, "Do you want to die?"
Minimally Conscious

Commentary on “Uncovering Awareness: Medical and Ethical Challenges in Diagnosing and Treating the Minimally Conscious State”

A commentary on Marie-Aurélie Bruno and Steven Laureys' article "Uncovering Awareness: Medical and Ethical Challenges in Diagnosing and Treating the Minimally Conscious State."
nurse monitors patient in ER
Minimally Conscious

Uncovering Awareness

Medical and Ethical Challenges in Diagnosing and Treating the Minimally Conscious State

Eight years ago an interdisciplinary group of scientists representing several institutions worked together to codify criteria for the minimally conscious state. Today, technology, such as functional neuroimaging, is beginning to change the way medical professionals diagnose, treat, and communicate with patients once considered to have no or very little conscious awareness.
Minimally Conscious

Hope for “Comatose” Patients

Each year, 1.5 million Americans suffer traumatic head injury; some lie unconscious for years. Two physicians argue for crucial distinctions among patients with severely impaired consciousness.

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