“Can he hear me?”. Such sayings are the inevitable question facing people whose relatives have slipped into a coma. And the answer to this question seems to be “yes.” In any case that suggests a neuroimaging study conducted by doctors at Northwestern University (Evanston, USA), published January 22, 2015 in the journal Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair .
Indeed, the work of these researchers show that when a patient is in coma, regular and repetitive voices telling him his close familiar stories (souvenirs …), can increase their brain activity.
More so, that on average the study shows, these patients recover and become conscious earlier than others, and their ability to respond appropriately to their environment, as participate in conversations, is significantly improved.
To achieve this, the authors of this work have conducted a six-week study involving 15 patients in a coma following a brain injury.
During the experiment, relatives of voice recordings were broadcasted daily to eight of these patients, four times per day. In these recordings, relatives told family stories well known to the patient, and frequently mentioned the name of the patient.
At the same time, while the recordings were released, the brain activity of the patients was analyzed via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Result? The imaging data, yellow and red light points appeared regularly in the regions involved in the recovery of memories stored in long term memory, and language processing.
This work was published on January 22, 2015 entitled “Placebo-Controlled Trial of Familiar Auditory Sensory Training for Acute Severe Traumatic Brain Injury” .
