A 25-year-old coma patient is recovering after doctors used new ultrasound treatment to “jump-start” his brain.
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The technique requires less energy than in ultrasounds used on pregnant women and utilizes sonic stimulation to rouse neurons in the thalamus region of the brain that helps process information.
They were stunned to see the patient fully conscious, talking, nodding and even giving his consultant a fist-bump just three days later.
Doctors said the medical team hopes the success of the procedure on the patient with a severe brain injury would lead to a non-invasive, low-priced treatment option.
In this case, the thalamus.
Further study will be needed to gauge whether this is a reliable way to treat all patients over a sustained period of time.
Previous experiments with stimulating the thalamus have required electrodes to be implanted into the thalamus, and the surgery to do so is risky for patients.
The device used, about the size of a saucer, creates a small sphere of energy that can be aimed at different parts of the brain to stimulate brain tissue. “Our approach directly targets the thalamus but is noninvasive”, he said.
A device developed at UCLA may have been responsible for a barely-conscious patient recovering from a coma and becoming fully able to comprehend language just three days after being the first subject of a novel brain treatment, a new study has found.
“It is possible that we were just very lucky and happened to have stimulated the patient just as he was spontaneously recovering”, Monti said, but if this technology was the cause of the man’s recovery, it may lead to new ways to treat patients in comas. The procedure took 10 minutes, during which the patient received ten 30-second stimulating impulses. The device was pioneered by another UCLA researcher, Alexander Bystritsky, who co-authored a study about the man’s condition in the journal Brain Stimulation.
But, the day after treatment, his responses improved enormously.
“The changes were remarkable”, Monti noted.
The technique targets the thalamus because, in people whose mental function is deeply impaired after a coma, thalamus performance is typically diminished.
Under the direction of Paul Vespa, a UCLA professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the researchers plan to test the procedure on several more people beginning this fall at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.
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Currently, there is nearly no effective treatment for such patients, he said.
