The study could help to determine which patients could recover
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Vegetative patients with severe brain damage who can’t communicate with the outside world can still learn
The study by Cambridge University, researchers attempted to teach 22 patients to associate a sound with a puff of air blown into their eyes. Some subjects learnt to anticipate the puff of air causing the muscles to twitch and blinked before they experienced the air puff.
The same ability was not seen in volunteers who had been put to sleep under anesthetic. The team hopes it may leads to tests to determine which patients could recover.
Dr Bekinschtein, who began the work as a PhD student in Argentina, said they found that patients who started to anticipate the puff of air were more likely to show signs of recovery later. He says, ‘Interestingly about 80 per cent of those who showed learning had some improvement, so it gives us some confidence that we can predict those who will show some level of recovery’.
The team is now planning a large clinical trial with colleagues in the US and Belgium, the findings of the study are to be published in Nature Neuroscience.
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