Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, continue to achieve success using ultrasound to start the brains of people trapped in a minimally conscious state. In a report this month they outline two patients with chronic and severe brain injuries who experienced improvement in their awareness of the outside world after undergoing treatment. The scientists are now more hopeful about the future of ultrasound for these difficult cases.
In 2016, Bradley Crehan, a California resident, was hit by a car that caused serious brain injury. After the operation, Crehan was placed in a medically induced coma to help him recover. But Crehan showed few signs of consciousness after waking up and was largely unable to communicate with others. He was then gave an experimental treatment called low-intensity-directed ultrasound (LIFU) by scientists at UCLA.
The treatment involved pulses of ultrasound directed at the thalamus of the brain – a region that helps us coordinate our motor and sensory functions and which presumably plays a key role in consciousness – in the hope of awakening activity that tends to during coma to sleep. A day after treatment, Crehan began to show signs of recovery and was abl to recognize and grasp objects. Days later, he was able to respond to questions by blinking. And within four months, sooner than doctors predicted, he was fully conscious and could leave the hospital, although he would still need ongoing physical therapy and rehabilitation.
As surprising as Crehan’s recovery was, it is of course possible that ultrasound therapy was not the case. cause. People who recover spontaneously from a coma-like condition are not unheard of, especially not in the first days and weeks after it started. It was possible that the technique was merely a red herring and that Crehan would have woken up no matter what doctors did.
In the new report, published this month in the journal Brain Stimulation, the authors say they are doing it now has more evidence that ultrasound can help people falter on the edge of their consciousness.
G / O Media can get a commission
They used the technique on three patients with chronic brain injuries that left them in a minimally conscious state a year. In one patient, the ultrasound did not appear to improve their function. But in the other two, doctors saw improvement within days after the first of two treatments. One patient – a 56-year-old man who a stroke – was able to respond to certain commands, answer yes-or-no questions and recognize family members in a photo. The other – a 50-year-old woman who suffered a cardiac arrest – could now recognize objects and communicate with others.
“What is remarkable is that both showed meaningful responses within days of the intervention,” study author and UCLA psychologist Martin Monti said in a statement. released by the university. ‘This is what we were hoping for, but it’s amazing to see it with your own eyes. To see within two days of treatment that two of our three patients who were in a chronic condition improved very significantly. ‘
Because chronic coma-like patients are much less likely to recover spontaneously than patients with acute coma, the researchers are more confident that ultrasound made the difference here. It is also important that no safety issues are noticed, while the vital signs of patients remain the same during treatment.
Unfortunately, the treatment of these patients did not lead to the same unbelievable repair what Crehan experienced. The 50-year-old woman did continue improved consciousness months later, but she was still considered minimally conscious, while the condition of the 56-year-old man reverted to his baseline during a follow-up visit three months later. It is likely that in many cases restoring people to their consciousness will remain a difficult and impossible task, even if this technique does work.
For the families of these patients, it is even worthwhile to have some regained awareness, and there may still be ways to improve the effectiveness of these and similar brain stimulation techniques. First, the UCLA scientists continue their research with ultrasound and hope to follow clinical trials with a larger group of patients soon. They also plan to study exactly how this technique changes the brain.