Scientists detect surge of brain activity in dying coma patients | WION

Final moments of euphoria

So scary😨I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy! !Gosh this must be traumatic for relatives of such patients. I can't imagine the anguish and anxiety family members of coma patients taken off life support might be feeling reliving the trauma and heartbreak and questioning themselves if they did right by taking such decision !! Gosh I read years ago about some hospital doctor falsely claiming patients were permanently brain dead and getting relatives to agree to donating their organs only to end up being exposed for falsifying diagnoses to harvest organs. May I never be in such situation, I don't know what Id do😓

It's nothing new. The response is pretty much the same for those who have had a clinical death and after being broth back, experience the same. These tests are quite literally useless.

I've witnessed my Mom talking to family members that were in a coma and they would react or start crying as she spoke to them. Open their eyes; however the doctor and nurses would say they couldn't hear or respond. They did☕😁.

World's first human head transplant successfully performed on a corpse, scientists say
'A full head swap between brain dead organ donors is the next stage.... We stand on the brink of a revolution, not only in medicine but in human life'2017

The world’s first full head transplant could take place as soon as 2017 if the controversial plans by Italian neuroscientist Dr Sergio Canavero come to pass. Wheelchair-bound Valery Spiridonov, who has the muscle-wasting Werdnig Hoffman disease, has volunteered to have his head transplanted onto a healthy body in a day-long operation.

The proposed surgery is highly controversial and its feasibility has been questioned by experts. But Dr Canavero’s plans also raise complex philosophical and ethical issues. A natural question is whether a living person with Spridinov’s head and someone else’s body would be the same person as Spridinov. In interviews, Spridinov has made it clear that he sees the proposed procedure as a way for him to live on with a new and healthy body.

A different perspective would be that Spridinov is a head-donor rather than the recipient of a new body. He is donating his head to someone else who will live the rest of his life with Spridinov’s head but won’t be the same person as Spridinov. On this account, Spridinov is signing his own death warrant by volunteering for the surgery.

Despite the advanced science involved, the issues the proposed surgery raises aren’t new. Writing in the 17th century, English philosopher John Locke claimed that sameness of person is fundamentally a matter of mental continuity. He illustrated his point by means of a famous thought experiment: imagine that the soul of a prince, carrying consciousness of the prince’s past life, were to enter the body of a cobbler. Everyone can see, Locke contends, that the person with the cobbler’s body and the prince’s consciousness would be the prince and not the cobber. It would be just to punish this person for the prince’s past misdeeds but not the cobbler’s.

Locke’s view continues to be highly influential today, but it is assumed by most philosophers that the seat of consciousness is the brain rather than the soul. A modern variation on Locke’s example, devised by American philosopher Sydney Shoemaker, involves transplantation of the brain rather than the soul. If Mr Brown’s brain were transplanted into Mr Robinson’s de-brained skull, the resulting person – Shoemaker calls him Mr Brownson - would look like Robinson but would in fact be Brown as long as he is aware of Brown’s past as his own past.

Researchers have transplanted human neurons into rat brains in work that aims to shed fresh light on debilitating neurological and psychiatric disorders such as epilepsy and schizophrenia.

The clumps of human cells took root inside the animal brains, hooked up to their blood supplies and tapped into rat brain circuits, allowing them to sense whisker movements and change how the animals behaved.

The groundbreaking procedure means scientists can now study how brain cells from patients with neuropsychiatric disorders malfunction in a living brain, and assess the impact of drugs in real time.

“Psychiatric disorders are a huge burden on society and it is very, very clear that we need better models for studying them,” said Sergiu Pasca, a professor of psychiatry who led the research at Stanford University. “We see patients and patients’ families that are desperate. There is no time to waste.”

The work is the latest advance in the ethically complex field of brain organoids, in which scientists grow tiny balls of human brain cells in the laboratory. Researchers have used organoids to probe brain development, autism, and the impact of infections such as Zika virus, but some have asked how scientists will know if organoids ever reach a point that they suffer or become conscious.

One practical issue facing the field is that lumps of brain tissue grown in the lab behave differently to neurons in the brain. Part of the problem is that organoids are not bathed in nutrients from a blood supply and not wired into the broader brain circuitry.

To overcome these latter problems, Pasca and his colleagues grew human brain organoids in a dish until they comprised between 500,000 and 1m neurons. The 1.5mm-wide balls of tissue were then transplanted into newborn rat brains, specifically a region called the somatosensory cortex, which processes tactile sensations such as whisker movement.

Five months later, MRI scans showed that the clumps of human brain tissue had grown six to eight times larger and hooked up to the animal’s blood supply. The human brain cells did not replace rat brain tissue but instead wired into it. Once grown, each organoid added about 5m human neurons to the rat’s 30m. Some rats received two organoids, one on each side of the brain.

Tests on the animals found no evidence that they performed any better, or suffered ill-effects. But the human neurons flickered with activity when air was blown across the rats’ whiskers, showing a melding between rat and human brain tissue. The scientists later trained the rats to expect a drink of water when the human cells in their brains were activated, showing that the human cells could affect the rats’ behaviour.

To show how the procedure could be valuable for research, the scientists created brain organoids from healthy human cells and others from patients with a genetic disorder called Timothy syndrome and transplanted them into rat brains. The patients’ brain organoids grew to the point that they exhibited clear abnormalities. Details are published in Nature. The team intends to study a range of conditions from epilepsy and schizophrenia to specific forms of autism, alongside drugs that might help some patients.

Gabriele Lignani at UCL’s Institute of Neurology said the work was “exciting” and opened new avenues to study neuropsychiatric diseases. “The combination of human cells with a full-body animal model overcomes limitations that these models have by their own,” he added.

Hank Greely, the director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University, who advised on the study, said organoid research raises a number of ethical issues. “What if the organoid has some kind of consciousness and it suffers as a result of the transplant? Or what if the transplanted animal takes on “human” characteristics?” he said. Greely does not believe these are problems today, but considers them worth discussing as the work advances. “It is not too early to think about how we could try to determine ‘society’s’ answer, if that day arrives,” he said.

Scientists transplant human brain cells into rats to study mental disorders, brain development
Scientists transplanted human cells into a rat's brain to create "hybrid circuits" that can be used to conduct experiments that would be deemed too invasive, dangerous or downright impossible to conduct on humans.2022

Scientists transplant human brain cells into the brains of baby rats

OCTOBER 12, 2022 / 11:50 AM / AP

My brother was in a coma, and we pulled the plug. This is something I've wondered before, but every time I did, i would very quickly chase the thought away.

If this is true, I can't describe to you the anguish and devastation that's consuming me right now.


I could've lived the rest of my life not knowing this. Losing my brother was the worst thing I've ever experienced by a long shot, and I've been through some very dark, horrific shit in my life, so that should tell you how painful my brothers death was for me.

The only thing worse than losing him would be to find out he was never actually lost, so to speak. To know that what killed him was our fucking decision to pull the plug after days of the doctors persuading us by saying there was no hope for him to wake up and that he was essentially gone. The rest of his life was gonna be unconscious in a hospital bed, wasting away. That's what we were told over and over.

My heart hurts so much after seeing this that I am positive I can feel it breaking, literally. 💔 the wind has been knocked out of me and it's as if someone punched me HARD in the stomach.


Again, I wish I didn't come across this, I really do. I don't know if I will be able to move on from knowing he could've been there, just unable to tell us that he was.

The thought of him listening to my mom reluctantly give in and tell the doctors she doesn't want him to suffer. If pulling the plug will keep that from happening, then that's what we must do for him. The thought that he could have KNOWN he was about to die and maybe fought as hard as he could to try to give any indication that he was not gone, but still right here with us, only to fail to do so. Did he accept that he was gonna die? Or did he desperately fight to wiggle his finger, open his eyes, or do anything to give us a sign up until the last second before his body took its last breath?

Honestly, as great as this is for scientific and medical practice, this is going to destroy me and a lot of other families that made the same decision we did. 😢 I pray my parents don't happen upon this info 💔

We know how computers work,but we`ll never know how the greatest computer of all,the brain,works.

As an atheist who has been in a coma, (and seizure), I am not afraid of death, I am curious of "after"

My sister was in coma 3rd stage,.. for about a week.... can't describe what I was going through.... but she survived, so many people were praying for her.... God bless all of them

Please pray for my brother 😭😭. He's married just for 2 months ,and now in coma . Only prayers can save him

Informative.

It made me reevaluate donating my organs. They must keep the body functioning so the organs don’t die. But then, does a person really die before the organs are removed? Just a thought.

I was in a coma for 6 weeks...

I walked within 24 hours (with the help of a walker) after total atrophy to my body...
I saw hell, in my coma, and all I can tell you in a short comment, is that GOD IS GOOD.

We are aware to a point; I had a cerebral hemorrhage & massive brain bleeding. Had to comfort those around my hospital bed. In coma for 2 weeks. Told them all the places I’d been traveling to while I was unconscious and that I was busy everyday while I was gone. I could also hear the music and talking around me.

Please pray for my grandfather 😭 he's my everything, he was in a coma fir 3 days now and they removed the IVs, he's not able to eat drink or anything, i really hope he wakes up, and doesn't die on me