Coma DDx

A useful way of approaching the unconscious patient is to use these three categories: Coma with focal or lateralizing signs, Coma without focal or lateralizing signs but with meningism, Coma without either focal or lateralizing signs or meningism.

 What It Took for Me to Survive a Coma

Expert medical care—and a devoted spouse—helped the author to regain consciousness after an illness caused the rapid failure of her organs and septic shock.

Can you wake up after decades in a coma? The story behind the headlines

Patients who emerge from a long-term minimally conscious state (not uncommon in the first few years) are likely to have profound and permanent physical and mental impairments. They remain dependent on others for day-to-day care and lack the ability to make crucial choices about their own lives. They may also be disoriented, unable to remember what happened a few moments ago, and able to engage in only limited conversation in response to prompts.

A Letter From Your Brain

I'm glad to see that you are awake! This is your brain talking. I had to find some way to communicate with you. I feel like I barely survived WWIII and am still not quite all in one piece. That's why I need you. I need you to take care of me.

Awakenings: Coma Patients Can Recover

In her 30 years of nursing, Nancy Valko brought so many patients out of comas that other nurses started asking if she was a witch.

Being in a Coma is Like One Long Lucid Dream

After contracting Legionnaires' disease, Stephanie Savage fell into a coma for six weeks. She dreamed about polar bears, ice cream, and scenes from science fiction movies.

Brain scans could predict recovery from coma

Having a family member in a coma is the ultimate waiting game. The person might wake up next week. Or next year. Or never. A new study from doctors in Europe may help reduce that uncertainty. By scanning an area of the brain often overlooked by neurologists, the researchers found a method that might predict whether or not a patient will recover from a coma. They reported the findings Wednesday in the journal Neurology.

Brain Stimulation May Give Hope to Coma Patients

To most of us, sleep resembles coma. But the sleeper will wake to shaking or the sound of an alarm, while the coma patient is completely unresponsive, save for some automatic reflexes, such as a knee-jerk reflex. Unlike sleep, coma is a disorder of consciousness, resulting from severe brain damage caused by head injury, stroke or oxygen deprivation.

Call It a Reversible Coma, Not Sleep

Is anesthesia like a coma? It’s a reversible drug-induced coma, to simplify. As with a coma that’s the result of a brain injury, the patient is unconscious, insensitive to pain, cannot move or remember. However, with anesthesia, once the drugs wear off, the coma wears off.

Coma and Persistent Vegetative State

A coma is a profound or deep state of unconsciousness. An individual in a state of coma is alive but unable to move or respond to his or her environment. Coma may occur as a complication of an underlying illness, or as a result of injuries, such as head trauma. A persistent vegetative state (commonly, but incorrectly, referred to as "brain death") sometimes follows a coma.

Family Voices and Stories Speed Coma Recovery

Coma patients who heard familiar stories repeated by family members four times a day for six weeks, via recordings played over headphones, recovered consciousness significantly faster and had an improved recovery compared to patients who did not hear the stories, reports the study.

How One Brain Came Back From Unconsciousness

Complicating this situation is a wave of new neurological research that suggests many seemingly unconscious patients have more consciousness than previously believed and, despite the severity of their injuries, a significant chance of meaningful recovery. Put simply, neuroscience is changing the meaning of “hopeless.”

I Was in a Coma and No One Will Tell Me What Happened

I was put in a medically induced coma. I remember nothing. So I wrote a novel about a woman who endured the same thing. Then I wrote another novel about a woman who does remember.

New Brain Activity State Exists In ‘Flat Line’ Coma Patients, Scans Suggest

When a patient’s brain falls completely silent, and electrical recordings devices show a flat line, reflecting a lack of brain activity, doctors consider the patient to have reached the deepest stage of a coma. However, new findings suggest there can be a coma stage even deeper than this flat line — and that brain activity can ramp up again from this state.

Recovery from Coma Is a Reality for Many Patients

The diagnosis of coma has become one of the biggest battlegrounds in medical care. While some doctors insist that comatose patients will never recover and should be starved or dehydrated to death, examples of people who have emerged from comas to live full and productive lives can be found across the country.

Scientists Discover Brain Activity Beyond A Deep Coma

A new study has found that EEG activity is possible beyond the point normally considered brain death.

Think Like a Doctor: The Girl in a Coma Solved

Over the past 20 years there have been many reports of young people, mostly young women, who have had seizures or become unconscious after taking the illegal drug Ecstasy, also known as MDMA.

What It's Like To Be In A Coma

Five years ago I was in a medically induced coma for 2 weeks. Here's what I remember about that time.

What People Can Remember From Being In A Coma

More commonly, people remember things that never happened. It's hard to characterize the different mental experiences that people have while in a coma. Some of them may be dreams, others are hallucinations.