Neuroscientist Adrian Owen on the consequences of traumatic brain injury

Kiley Lambert ( Bio  /   Posts )  |  Tuesday, January 11, 2011 UTC

The long-term consequences of traumatic brain injury, such as the one sustained by U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords who was shot through the skull at a shopping center in Tucson, Arizona this weekend, are at the center of PopTech 2010 speaker Dr. Adrian Owen’s research. Owen, a neuroscientist who holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at the University of Western Ontario, has been working since the 1990s to determine levels of consciousness in vegetative patients.

Patients sometimes emerge from a coma, like the one medically induced by Giffords’ doctors, without ever becoming aware. That is, they cannot follow commands and show no sign of consciousness, though their lips might move or eyelids might open. What Owen and his colleagues have discovered, though, is that some patients are conscious despite being unable to move their limbs or communicate verbally.

“We have a logical problem here,” Owen told the PopTech audience in October. “If a patient was conscious but incapable of generating responses, which is the hallmark of vegetative state, we would logically have no way of knowing if that person was conscious.”

By using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, Owen was able to determine that certain patients’ brains were responding to commands as they would if they were normal. In the case of a young woman who had been entirely vegetative for five months following a traffic accident, Owens said, “We asked her to imagine playing tennis. And she activated the same area of her brain as a healthy volunteer despite outwardly showing no signs of being conscious. When we asked her to relax, the activity disappeared.”

Owens and his team have recently begun to focus on ways to use evidence of brain activity to allow patients to answer simple yes-no questions.

“The question now is can we hone this technique to actually communicate with these individuals? Can we turn this into a rudimentary language?” he asked.

Giffords’ doctors remain guarded about her condition and eventual prospects, and there is little that can be known about her mental state until she is brought out of her coma. Still, the ongoing work of Owen and his team hold out the promise that even someone with devastating injuries might still one day be able to communicate.

Tags:

Rate this post:

  • Meh.
  • Love it!
  • Community Rating: 7
Click and drag above to vote.

Comments

Add your comment

No HTML or JavaScript, please.

Keep in mind, your comment may take up to 15 minutes to appear if approved.


(Not shared or displayed)