Doctors 'Awaken' Man 6 Years After Severe Brain Injury

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The patient was the first of 12 patients to try deep brain stimulation in a U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved trial.

Dr. Ali Rezai, senior author of the paper and director of the Cleveland Clinic's Center for Neurological Restoration, said, "There's a great period of scientific discovery coming with respect to traumatic brain injury. This had been a great big desert of unknowns. There are 1.5 million new cases of TBI [traumatic brain injury] in the U.S. each year and two-thirds of Iraq war veterans have TBI. This is an exciting time to come."

The finding is published in the Aug. 2 issue of Nature.

People in a minimally conscious state can show sporadic evidence that they are aware of themselves or their environment. The state is not the same as a persistent vegetative state or a coma.

An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 traumatic brain injury patients in the United States are currently diagnosed with minimally conscious state. Most do not receive active rehabilitation and are relegated to long-term facilities.

"These patients are devastated and their families are devastated. They are taken to nursing homes and chronic-care facilities and forgotten about," Rezai said.

But some patients in a minimally conscious state, including the man in the new study, do retain brain activity. In one other recent high-profile case, 39-year-old Terry Wallis of Mountain View, Ark. regained speech and movement two decades after a truck accident left him in a minimally conscious state. Some of the same researchers involved with the new study also documented the Wallis "awakening," proposing that the re-growth of neural networks was responsible.

The patient who is the subject of the new study underwent a 10-hour operation during which electrodes were implanted into his brain and used to stimulate the thalamus on both sides of the brain. The procedure has been used before in Parkinson's disease, dystonia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression.

According to Rezai, the procedure required much more precision when used for minimally conscious state. "You have to target specific parts of the brain with millimeter precision using various computer-generated brain maps and physiological mapping," he explained.