OBJECTIVE Our purpose was to provide a comprehensive understanding of how women informal caregivers of patients in vegetative state (VS) or minimally conscious state (MCS) describe, represent, and experience changes that occurred in their life after the acute event of their family member. METHODS A qualitative study was conducted and fifteen women informal caregivers, mothers, or spouses of p...

OBJECTIVE To describes socio-demographic and clinical features of adults and children in vegetative state (VS) and minimally conscious state (MCS). DESIGN Observational cross-sectional study. METHODS Demographic, aetiological and clinical data were collected, together with patients' management procedures. Mann-Whitney U-test was used for continuous variables and chi-squared test for categor...

A learning test procedure based on operant principles may be useful in the diagnosis (and eventually rehabilitation) of post-coma persons with minimal responsiveness. This study was aimed at extending the evaluation of such a procedure with seven participants who presented with very limited behavior and apparently severe disorders of consciousness. The procedure was evaluated through an ABACB d...

The minimally conscious state (MCS) defines a functional level of recovery following severe brain injuries. Patients in MCS demonstrate unequivocal evidence of response to their environment yet fail to recover the ability to communicate. Drawing on recent functional brain-imaging studies, pathological data, and neurophysiological investigations, models of brain function in MCS are proposed. MCS...

In recent years, numerous electrophysiological signatures of consciousness have been proposed. Here, we perform a systematic analysis of these electroencephalography markers by quantifying their efficiency in differentiating patients in a vegetative state from those in a minimally conscious or conscious state. Capitalizing on a review of previous experiments and current theories, we identify a ...

BACKGROUND The diagnostic usefulness of electrophysiological methods in assessing disorders of consciousness (DoC) remains to be established on an individual patient level, and there is need to determine what constitutes robust experimental paradigm to elicit electrophysiological indices of covert cognitive capacity. OBJECTIVES Two tasks encompassing active and passive conditions were explore...

Diagnosis of patients with a disorder of consciousness is very challenging. Previous studies investigating resting state networks demonstrate that 2 main features of the so-called default mode network (DMN), metabolism and functional connectivity, are impaired in patients with a disorder of consciousness. However, task-induced deactivation--a third main feature of the DMN--has not been explored...

methods of modulating brain neural plasticity, improving memory and learning, improving recovery from traumatic brain injury, preventing epilepsy, treating memory disorders, and treating persistent impairment of consciousness in humans and animals by nerve stimulation are provided. widespread loss of cerebral connectivity is assumed to underlie the failure of brain mechanisms that support commu...

INTRODUCTION In healthy conditions, group-level fMRI resting state analyses identify ten resting state networks (RSNs) of cognitive relevance. Here, we aim to assess the ten-network model in severely brain-injured patients suffering from disorders of consciousness and to identify those networks which will be most relevant to discriminate between patients and healthy subjects. METHODS 300 fMRI...