Important Finding on Coma Decisions

The difficulty in determining the true nature of injury and making what can be horrible choices for patients with vegetative or minimally conscious states is well known. Investigators using resting state EEG (Fingelkurts AA, et al. 2011) show that (1) the EEGs for non survivors were significantly lower than for survivors; (2) there was a higher probability of mostly delta and slow beta waves during first assessment for patients with bad outcome (i.e. those who died within the first six months); (3) patients with a good outcome had higher probability of mostly fast-beta and alpha oscillations. Therefore resting state EEGs may have a potentially prognostic value with regards to outcome from VS or MCS. This will also be potentially helpful in medical-legal end of life decision making.