The man, who remains unnamed, was in a car crash at age 20 and has
spent the last 15 years in a vegetative state, able to occasionally open
his eyes (therefore ruling out a coma, which results in no bodily
movement), but with no other signs of awareness.
The study was led by Dr. Angela Sirigu of the Institut des Sciences
Cognitives — Marc Jeannerod in Lyon, France, who, along with a team of
researchers, discovered that the key to waking the man up lied in the
vagus nerve.
The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve, extending from the colon
all the way up through the abdomen, chest, and neck to the brain. It’s
in charge of tasks like regulating heart rate, sweating and controlling
muscles in the small intestine. Doctors stimulate the vagus nerve to
treat depression and seizures from epilepsy.
Sirigu and her team stimulated the nerve by implanting a device
underneath the skin in his chest, similar to a pacemaker, and sending
electrical currents along the nerve to the brain stem. They saw
improvement after just a month, but six months later, he was able to
move and consciously respond to external stimuli.
The man still suffers severe brain damage and cannot speak, but he was
able to follow movement with his eyes, turn his head when someone was
speaking to him and even appeared to cry upon hearing his favorite song.
Because traumatic brain injuries have so many different causes, this
technique may not work for all patients in similar vegetative states,
but it is a key to “challenging the belief that disorders of
consciousness persisting after 12 months are irreversible,” states the
study.
Vegetative states lasting more than a year are typically seen as lost
causes, but this French man isn’t the first person to wake up after
long-term unconsciousness lasting over a decade. Martin Pistorius, from
South Africa, was in a vegetative state for 12 years, Terry Wallis of
Arkansas woke from a 19-year coma in 2003 and Jan Grzebski, from Poland,
woke from his 19-year coma in 2006.
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