Parts of the brain may still be alive after a person's brain activity is said to have flatlined.
When someone is in a deep coma, their brain activity can go silent. An electroencephalogram measuring this activity may eventually show a flatline, usually taken as a sign of brain death.
However, while monitoring a patient who had been placed in a deep coma to prevent seizures following a cardiac arrest, Bogdan Florea, a physician at the Regina Maria Medical Centre in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, noticed a strange thing – some tiny intermittent bursts of activity were interrupting an otherwise flatline signal, each lasting a few seconds.
The findings challenge the notion that an EEG flatline is the ultimate sign of a brain death. Legal criteria vary, but a diagnosis of brain death generally requires two examinations 24 hours apart that show irreversible and complete cessation of brain activity.
"We should abandon the idea that a flat EEG proves zero neuronal activity," says Steven Laureys who researches consciousness at the University of Liege in Belgium.The findings do not suggest that a person who has been deemed brain-dead would be likely to wake up.
But Amzica speculates that it might be beneficial to place someone with severe brain damage in this unusually deep coma state to keep the brain silent but alive while working on treating the problem.
"The results offer us a better understanding of the residual activity of the brain under coma or anaesthetic," says Laureys. "These ripples are known to be important in sleep, but their role in coma is ill-understood, so I think this is something to be investigated further."
Read more - http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24228-mysterious-bursts-of-activity-in-flatlining-brain.html#.UjxgSqFraM8
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New technology helps to keep the body "living" while also giving doctors time to diagnose the heart attack's source and treat it. More time and care mean an increased chance of survival and ensure further research can be conducted on cardiac arrests — still the most common cause of death worldwide.
Read more - http://theweek.com/article/index/244147/how-an-australian-hospital-is-bringing-clinically-dead-people-back-to-life
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