INTRODUCTION We studied whether the choice of timing of discussing organ donation for the first time with the relatives of a patient with catastrophic brain injury in The Netherlands has changed over time and explored its possible consequences. Second, we investigated how thorough the process of brain death determination was over time by studying the number of medical specialists involved. And ...

The "brain death" standard as a criterion of death is closely associated with the need for transplantable organs from heart-beating donors. Are all of these potential donors really dead, or does the documented evidence of patients destined for organ harvesting who improve, or even recover to live normal lives, call into question the premise underlying "brain death"? The aim of this paper is to ...

Introduction: We quantified the potential for organ donation and identified missed opportunities for organ donation in a single institute. Materials and methods: Data of potential organ donors and the outcome of requests fororgan donation in the intensive care unit (ICU) of Ajou University Hospital between January 2013 and July 2015 were collected and reviewed. Results: Of 1338 deaths that occu...

Australia has a shortfall in donated hearts for transplantation. Hearts are usually procured from brain dead donors, but procurement from circulatory dead donors is a potential additional source. However, heart transplantation after circulatory death of the donor may not conform to the dead donor rule. An amendment in law is required to permit heart procurement for transplantation after circula...

The improvement in the field of kidney transplantation, during the last decades, has brought kindey transplantation to the top of patient preference as the best kidney replacement therapy. The use of marginal kidney grafts, which are highly immunogenic has become common practice because of lack of kidney donors. Inflammatory activity in the kidneys after brain death is an ongoing phenomenon. Th...

Animals use multiple strategies to maintain spatial orientation. Dead reckoning is a form of spatial navigation that depends on self-movement cue processing. During dead reckoning, the generation of self-movement cues from a starting position to an animal's current position allow for the estimation of direction and distance to the position movement originated. A network of brain structures has ...

Brain dead organ donors are the principal source of transplantable organs. However, it is controversial whether brain death is the same as biological death. Therefore, it is unclear whether organ removal in brain death is consistent with the 'dead donor rule', which states that organ removal must not cause death. Our aim was to evaluate the public's opinion about organ removal if explicitly des...

formula one legend michael schumacher hit his head severely while skiing on december 29, 2013. he was operated on for brain decompression and left in a coma fighting for life. in such severe brain injury with cerebral contusion and hemorrhage following head trauma, refractory to medical therapy and with increasing cerebral oedema and intracranial pressure, critically low cerebral perfusion can ...

Some brain injured patients are left in a permanent vegetative state, i.e., they have irreversibly lost their capacity for consciousness but retained some autonomic physiological functions, such as breathing unaided. Having discussed the controversial nature of the permanent vegetative state as a diagnostic category, we turn to the question of the patients' ontological status. Are the permanent...