Japanese neurosurgeons said here Sunday that they have restored seven coma patients to consciousness with electrical stimulation of tissue deep inside the brain.
Their pioneering surgery in Japan has important implications for this country's 12,000 comatose patients. The number of Americans in long-term comas - most from head injuries - increases by about 2,000 a year.Two neurosurgeons from Nihon University's School of Medicine in Tokyo described their treatment at an international conference on brain injury. The conference ends Wednesday.
Japan also has about 12,000 comatose patients. Doctors say they are in "persistent vegetative states." They appear to be awake, opening their eyes, making random movements and breathing on their own. However, the patients cannot communicate and seem completely unaware of their environment. They're kept alive with expensive round-the-clock care, including tube feeding.
A few such patients awake spontaneously, but most do not.
In 1985, Dr. Takashi Tsubokawa, the chairman of neurosurgery at Nihon medical school, began long-term monitoring of the latter group of patients to see if they might benefit from electrical stimulation inside their brains.
Since 1988, 20 comatose patients have been selected for surgery on the basis of "grades" they received as the result of monitoring of their brain waves.
"We also measured whether the patients had the `storms' of electrical activity common during dreams," Yoichi Katayama said.
All 20 patients had been in persistent vegetative states for at least three months. As expected, seven patients with the highest brain-monitoring scores benefited most from the surgery, Katayama said. "They fully regained consciousness," he said.
They spoke meaningful words or phrases, understood what others said and were able to eat with some assistance from others, said Takamitsu Yamamoto, assistant professor of neurosurgery at Nihon.