The goal of our study was to investigate different aspects of sleep, namely the sleep-wake cycle and sleep stages, in the vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (VS/UWS), and minimally conscious state (MCS). A 24-h polysomnography was performed in 20 patients who were in a UWS (n=10) or in a MCS (n=10) because of brain injury. The data were first tested for the presence of a sleep-w...

The Medical Journal of Australia ISSN: 0025729X 6 May 2013 198 8 440-442 ©The Medical Journal of Australia 2013 www.mja.com.au Notable Cases form activity. CSF bacterial cult testing and polymerase chain r simplex virus and enterovirus we cal testing was negative. The pat to deteriorate, with a declinin progressive quadriparesis and r tating endotracheal intubation a on Day 12 after admission. ...

Consciousness is a multifaceted concept that has two dimensions: arousal, or wakefulness (i.e., level of consciousness), and awareness (i.e., content of consciousness) (Laureys et al., 2004). An accurate and reliable assessment of the arousal and awareness of consciousness in patients with severe brain damage is of greatest importance for the differential diagnosis of low levels consciousness p...

Patients suffering from chronic disorders of consciousness (DOC) are characterized by profound unawareness and an impairment of large-scale cortical and subcortical connectivity. In this study, we applied an electrophysiological approach aimed at identifying the residual audiomotor connectivity patterns that are thought to be linked to awareness. We measured some markers of audiomotor integrati...

Johan Stender1, Ron Kupers1, Maurice Ptito1,2* and Albert Gjedde1 1Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark 2Chaire de recherche Harland Sanders, Ecole d Optometrie, Universite de Montreal, Qc, Canada *Corresponding author: Maurice Ptito, Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, Tel: 514-398-650...

Background: Alzheimer dementia as the most common cause of dementia is a chronic, progressive, irreversible and incurable disease. The second most common cause of dementia after Alzheimer is vascular dementia. One of the systems involved in dementia is the visuospatial system and visual evoked potential (VEP) can be one of the diagnostic methods for this disease. Therefore, the present study ai...

INTRODUCTION A number of studies highlight the difficulty in forming a diagnosis for patients with disorders of consciousness when this is established merely on behavioral assessments. BACKGROUND Positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and electroencephalography combined with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS-EEG) ...

Brain damage of various aetiologies can lead to different disorders of consciousness (DOC), varying from coma to vegetative, to minimally conscious states. Each state is characterised by a different degree of wakefulness, awareness, pain sensitivity and is differentially handled with respect to treatment, ethical considerations and end-oflife decisions. Thus, its correct identification is cruci...

OBJECTIVE To investigate functional connectivity between the default mode network (DMN) and other networks in disorders of consciousness. METHODS We analyzed MRI data from 11 patients in a vegetative state and 7 patients in a minimally conscious state along with age- and sex-matched healthy control subjects. MRI data analysis included nonlinear spatial normalization to compensate for disease-...

The ability to recognize one’s own face is a hallmark of self-awareness. In healthy subjects, the sympathetic skin response evoked by self-face recognition has a greater area under the curve of the signal than responses evoked by other visual stimuli. We evaluated the sympathetic skin responses evoked by self-face images and by six other visual stimuli (conditions) in 15 patients with severe di...