A new medical experiment aimed at increasing the awareness level comatose patients are in showed promising results after 26-year-old Josh Villa, who suffered terrible brain damage in a car accident in 2005, started exhibiting consciousness symptoms after a number of therapy sessions, carried out with a device called a transcranial magnetic stimulator (TMS). This piece of equipment is nothing more than an electromagnetic coil that generates magnetic pulses at various time intervals.
After some 15 sessions, Dr. Theresa Pape, at the US Department of Veterans Affairs in Chicago, observed that the patient became conscious and started speaking, tough admittedly very slowly and unintelligibly. He said words like "help" or "help me" and proved to be very responsive to outside stimuli, in that he understood what was said to him and could react to it. The patient could move his eyes following a finger and could also blink, so as to approve or disapprove of something. This led doctors to believe that he could understand what was being said to him and that the information was processed, tough his brain had suffered serious damage.
This was all possible with the aid of this device that can stimulate or inhibit the natural response synapses give to each other. In Villa's case, the apparatus was set to stimulate the flow of information in the patient’s frontal lobe, by increasing the interactions between his neurons. To that end, the experiment was a success. Both Josh's mother and girlfriend say that caring for him became much easier since the TMS sessions. Although, at some point, the device stopped having any effect on the patient, Dr. Pape says that this could have something to do with the fact that it was the first time when TMS, created mainly to alleviate migraines and symptoms of Parkinson's disease, was used to try to awake coma patients.
Even with the relative success of this new form of treatment, scientists draw attention to the fact that the current results could have been a consequence of some natural occurrence in the development of this particular coma case. Others say that further experimentation with this technique is required, before any real assessment of its efficiency can be made. However, Dr. Pape hopes to begin experimenting on another patient this fall. Her results should provide more insight into how this technique actually works.
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