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Patient Revives After 19 Years By Rewiring Brain

Posted by Zonk on Tue Jul 04, 2006 08:57 AM
from the my-favorite-organ dept.
Science
dylanduck writes "A study of the recovery of a man who spent 19 years in a minimally conscious state has revealed the likely cause of his regained consciousness - his brain rewired itself around the injured areas into totally novel structures. It suggests the human brain shows far greater potential for recovery and regeneration then ever suspected." From the article: "There were ... significant changes between scans taken just two months after the recovery, and the most recent, at 18 months. Some of the new pathways had receded again, while others seem to have strengthened and taken over as Wallis continued to improve."
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  • So, did he get X-ray vision? (Score:5, Funny)

    by 10Ghz (453478) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:01AM (#15655918)
    "Surprisingly, the circuits look nothing like normal brain anatomy"

    Well, it IS possible! Right?

  • Damn typical slashdot stories (Score:5, Funny)

    by zegebbers (751020) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:01AM (#15655921) Homepage
    it took me about 5 tries before I realised this wasn't about brain patents :(

  • Please note... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Homology (639438) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:05AM (#15655934)
    that although Slashdot regulars generally are in a "minimally conscious state", for rewiring to occur there must be something to rewire in the first place.

      • Re:Please note... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Elemenope (905108) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:44AM (#15656105)

        Not to harsh on you (especially since you wrote in at 9am), but I'd love it if the 'we only use 10% of our brains' meme would die, die, die!!!! already. It's not even superficially true; what is true is that a very large part of the brain structure is used for wiring instead of for information storage, but how would one get a functional device if all it had was memory and no processing circuits? The structure itself, one might imagine, is where the the lower order (and probably some higher order) information processing algorithms are 'stored'; that these structures only take up approximately 90% of the total machine is astonishing.

  • Yeah but can he see the future? (Score:5, Funny)

    by gijoel (628142) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:07AM (#15655938)
    Because I'd be pretty pissed if I spent 18 years in a coma and I wasn't psychic.

  • Most interesting... (Score:4, Funny)

    by dk-software-engineer (980441) * on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:08AM (#15655943)
    Wow. The brain is without doubt the most interesting part of the (male) human body.

  • Terri Schiavo... (Score:5, Funny)

    by l33td00d42 (873726) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:11AM (#15655960)
    ... was unavailable for comment.

    /so going to hell

    • Re:Terri Schiavo... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ScentCone (795499) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:18AM (#15655984)
      Terri Schiavo ... was unavailable for comment.

      Thanks for taking one for team and saying what everyone else was thinking. But just in case anyone is really thinking there's an important parallel there or anything, remember that her case was substantially different: most of her brain was literally dead and gone - actually a mush of fluid. Rewiring "around" an injured area (as in the case cited) depends upon having surrounding brain material that's still viable. She was coasting on real low-level left-overs, and there simply wasn't a platform for that sort of recovery.

        • Re:Terri Schiavo... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by plunge (27239) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @10:12AM (#15656219)
          While Schiavo in particular was indeed gorked beyond ungorking, its a little misleading to show laypeople that scan and claim that it dramatically demonstrates the point. There are actually people walking around today with CT scans that are similarly horrifying in the huge spaces. There are people making do okay with some very abnormal brains. The difference with Schiavo is that the spaces were caused by particular sorts of massive brain inujries and the complete atrophy of particular areas of the brain. But you can't tell that directly from a CT, especially as a layperson. For all a layperson knows, the critical areas could simply be moved around and squished but still functioning to some degree. In Schiavo they were not, but a layperson just can't tell so dramatically as looking at one CT.

          It's also important to remember that the brain is not ALL just undifferentiated mush, but has all sort of specialized areas that cannot be replaced by other specialized areas. The guy in this article has damage to some of those areas, and more importantly ther breaking of important connections BETWEEN areas, but not a total loss of any area: they still had functioning sections that rewired and worked overtime to compensate. However, if both of your hippocampi die, it's not like your amygdala is suddenly going to switch over and start performing their functions.

          This case has been paraded around because of the Schiavo case, but in doing so its only illuminated how medically ignorant some people are: they don't care about the specifics, or learning about how the brain works, and they lump together uncertainties about one area of knowledge about the brain (its ability to create new connections to repair damage, which contrary to the sort of hyperbolic claims of the article, we've always known is pretty plastic and this is just an extreme example) and try to pretend that raise questions about a completely different area of knowledge: all without acknowledging that there are any key differences or even thinking about them.

            • Re: Dude, where's my hemisphere? (Score:5, Insightful)

              by plunge (27239) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @12:05PM (#15656655)
              Again, this is the problem when people use grand generalizations about complex things like the brain without knowing specifically what they are talking about. Hemispheres have basic redundancies built into their structures. That's just not the same thing as removing key structures entirely, from both hemispheres.

        • Re:Terri Schiavo... (Score:4, Informative)

          by MightyMartian (840721) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @11:26AM (#15656524) Journal
          It hardly defies our current knowledge of the brain. Rewiring happens in stroke victims, for instance. Mrs. Schiavo's forebrain was missing entirely, replaced by cerebral fluid. Rewiring is one thing, but the only thing that would have made her better would have been regrowing.

            • Re:Terri Schiavo... (Score:4, Informative)

              by Cecil (37810) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @11:38AM (#15656572) Homepage
              Except that a hemispherectomy isn't recoverable once your brain is developed. Although the wikipedia entry does not explicitly say so, it does suggest from the pediatric links and occasional use of the world 'child' that hemispherectomies only work on very young children, before their brains have developed to be reliant on both hemispheres.

            • Re:Terri Schiavo... (Score:5, Informative)

              by ceoyoyo (59147) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @12:06PM (#15656659)
              A hemispherectomy is not a half brain lobotomy. At a (very) high level your brain consists of four major anatomical regions, the brain stem, cerebellum and the two hemispheres of the cerebrum. The cerebellum is known to handle coordinated motions and looks like it's involved in memory too. The brain stem is the oldest part and takes care of all the vital functions like breathing. The cerebrum is where most of the interesting stuff happens, like personality, intelligence, voluntary movement and processing of sensory information.

              A hemispherectomy removes up to half of the cerebrum. To be technically alive you only need an operating brain stem. The brain stem isn't plastic though -- it won't rewire itself to make you conscious again. Only the cerebrum can do that.

              So the difference between Terri Schiavo and this guy is that Ms. Schiavo had a devastated cerebrum and enough brian stem left to keep her sort of alive. This guy had some localized damage that happened to be in a critical area.

  • Yes! (Score:5, Funny)

    by MyLongNickName (822545) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:21AM (#15655995) Journal
    There is hope for Slashdot after all!

  • Neuronal remodeling (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BWJones (18351) * on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:22AM (#15656002) Homepage Journal
    Neuroscientists in the epilepsy and learning and memory communities have known for years about the nervous systems ability to rewire and remodel in response to deafferentation. In fact, the reluctance to believe in this by other members of the neuroscience community (vision community) led to some two decades of misunderstanding of retinal degenerative diseases until we came along and demonstrated conclusively in the retina that remodeling also occurs. The deal is that neurons need input. They either get it via glutamatergic signaling or calcium mediated signaling in normal circumstances. When those signaling mechanisms are disturbed, neurons either rewire seeking additional input, or they die.

    • I was tought in biology class back in highschool than nerves has the ability to regenerate themselves over time. A friend of mine suffered a great injury on one of his arms because of an accident, that left him with a piece of titanium on it and a paralized hand. He couldn't move it because his nerves got cut. But after some time he regained movility of his hand and fingers, as the axons grew and reconnected. Seems obvious to me that brain cells can do the same.

      • Re:Neuronal remodeling (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ceoyoyo (59147) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @12:15PM (#15656691)
        Axons can regrow if the neuron itself is still alive. Neurons don't normally (there are notable exceptions) reproduce so once you kill the cell it's gone.

        Your friend's case is sort of like spontaneously repairing a cut trace on the motherboard of a computer. This case is more like the extra floating point unit in the processor reconfiguring itself to replace a damaged instruction decoder.

  • Limiting factors in rewiring rates? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Boo5000. (732797) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:29AM (#15656036)
    I would like to know what limits the rewiring rate in such a state? Is it metabolic? Or does the rate of new axon growth and synapse formation follow the normal growth rate of neural cells late in life - which, as I recall, is fairly slow?. This was obviously a long process, but was there a certain "critical point" reached during the rewiring that, once passed, assured recovery of functions? Is this subconscious dreaming or thinking that manipulates signaling, and could simple brain simulaion methods achieve a similar goal in the absence of such a process? Hopefully such a case generates academic interest that will help progress this area of brain research.

  • We can rebuild him.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dedeman (726830) <dedeman1.yahoo@com> on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:31AM (#15656050)
    Well, this is absolutley incredible news, but I am curious if some would see it as being a survival mechinism?

    Except for Rip Van Winkle, I don't think that a 19 year period of repair and adaption would really lend itself to survival. Not to say that this isn't miraculous, but, I'm sure the recovery time will be significant.

    Besides, would you really want to wake up 20 years older, with years of rehabilitation to look forward to? I would be more concerned with the ethics of keeping someone alive for that long.

    • Re:We can rebuild him.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Wireless Joe (604314) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @10:09AM (#15656203) Homepage
      Besides, would you really want to wake up 20 years older, with years of rehabilitation to look forward to?
      My son developed Periventricular leukomalacia (PVL) soon after he was born. PVL is usually characterized by large cysts in the brain that affect particular functions. In my son's case, the PVL was diffuese and spread throughout his brain in small, rice-grain sized cysts and affects his general functionality. We're not "keeping him alive" in a medical sence, but he does seemed destined to spend the rest of his life in a "minimally conscious state".

      He's four years old now, and I would love if my son, at any age, woke up one day and started to learn the things he's missed (talking, crawling and then walking, etc). My wife and I read a lot about brain injury and the possibility of his recovery. The nature of his injury always gives me hope that because the damaged areas are so small, it may be easier for his brain to compensate.

      Unfortunately, because of the state of medical research in the USA (stem cell especially), My family is probably going to have to travel to another country to take advantage of any treatments that may be developed in the next few years.

  • TFA: Rip Van Winkle (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sm62704 (957197) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:32AM (#15656054) Journal
    Wallis regained the ability to move and communicate, and started getting to know his now 20 year old daughter - a difficult process considering he believed himself to be 19, and that Ronald Reagan was still president.

    I was in a real bad wreck in 1976, my brain hardly worked for a year or more, but I got better. I wonder what a scan of it would look like? Would it be wierdly wired like this guy's?

    Few people I know would be surprised to find my brain was wired wierd.

    Since then, the thought has occurred to me that I could have actually gone into a coma and the last forty years could have been a dream. But then, any of you could have had an accident and not know it, and be dreaming this. So there's little point in not behaving as if reality is real, especially considering the incredibly high probability that this IS real.

    I wonder if he dreamed?

  • Oblig. Simpsons (Score:5, Funny)

    by amliebsch (724858) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @09:33AM (#15656063) Journal

    NEWSIE:
    Tonight, on Eyewitness News: a man who's been in a coma for 19 years wakes up.

    MAN:
    Do Sonny and Cher still have that stupid show?

    NEWSIE:
    No, uh, she won an Oscar, and he's a Congressman.

    MAN:
    Good night! [Turns over and dies.]

    • From TFA: a difficult process considering he believed himself to be 19, and that Ronald Reagan was still president.

      So this guy's in coma for 19 years, and he wakes up, and he asks, "How's President Reagan doing?" And the doctor says, "Sir, Reagan is dead." And the guy says, "Oh God, no, that means Bush is President!"

      (The original was Eisenhower and Nixon. The more things change ...)

  • Poor guy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The MAZZTer (911996) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {tzzagem}> on Tuesday July 04 2006, @10:34AM (#15656292) Homepage

    I mean think about it, last time he was awake was in 1987. The world has changed ALOT since then... I wonder how I'd feel?

    "Internet? What's that? Computers, those are the huge things that big businesses and the government use, right?"

  • El bulto (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Spy der Mann (805235) <spydermann@slashdot.gmail@com> on Tuesday July 04 2006, @10:41AM (#15656323) Homepage Journal
    There was a mexican movie (ficticious) about a 19-yo guy who went into coma in 1971 and woke up in 1992, having to cope with a grown up family, an older (and remarried) wife, and of course, new political times.

    It was called "El bulto" [imdb.com] (the bag). Very interesting movie.
  • Actually small children can have at least half of their brain removed [newyorker.com] and still function normally in later life. It's pretty amazing! I once read about a man who had had to take a brain scan. The scan revealed that the only brain tissue he had, only covered the inner surface of his skull, apparently he was born like that, and he functioned normally. Of course I cannot find any documentation about it now, but the link I've provided describes a "normal" procedure. It can cure rare epeleptic disorders and other things.
    Mind boggling ;)

  • TV Show? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Joao (155665) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @11:11AM (#15656462) Homepage
    I saw a TV show about this guy some time ago (PBS? Discovery? National Geographic?). Yes, he is awake, but the poor guy is in very bad shape. He has very limited use of his body; his brain is unable to store any new information for more than a few seconds; and his frontal lobe is basically gone so he has no sense of boundaries when communicating with people. His 20-year old daughter is his primary caretaker, and since he thinks he's a 19 year-old and is unable to remember that she is his daughter, he keeps asking her for sexual favors and groping her any chance he has. He is also very verbally abusive towards her and pretty much everyone else.

    Yes, he's no longer in a coma, but he is far from functional.

  • Delta brain wave (Score:4, Funny)

    by DaFallus (805248) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @11:55AM (#15656629)
    Somehow he has cobbled together a random assortment of other brainwaves into a working mind.

  • There is more to the story of Terry Wallis (Score:5, Informative)

    by hernick (63550) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @02:55PM (#15657238)
    Terry woke up three years ago, and the story was rather widely reported back then. In fact, Terri Schiavo has, in her time, often been compared to Terry - in fact, their medical cases share almost no similarities.

    The story itself has woken up in 2006, for reasons unknown. You can find a better article than the one of the front page at http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060703/full/060703 -5.html [nature.com]

    This everything2 article is probably the best I found about Terry, including updates from 2004: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=147582 5 [everything2.com]

    Also, some updates on the family's fight with health services, from 2005: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/6/21 /143438.shtml [newsmax.com]

    • Re:This is why I'm against organ transplants (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PhotoBoy (684898) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @10:13AM (#15656222)
      I believe the difference between this case and something like Terry Schiavo is that there was still measurable brain activity in this guy so he wasn't brain dead.

      But I agree it would be pretty shitty to wake up and find half your body gone to organ donation. The recent successful face transplant in France used part of the face of a brain dead patient. Imagine waking up to be told you'd had your face removed and given to someone else!

    • Medical bill (Score:5, Insightful)

      by phorm (591458) on Tuesday July 04 2006, @10:42AM (#15656330) Homepage Journal
      Keeping him on support all this time must have been (or will be) an incredible financial drain on his family. I'd imagine that the medical bill was ludicrous, so hopefully he comes from a family with money. Being alive is great, but life sure isn't going to be easy considering:

      a) When he looks into a mirror his face will be 19 years older... from 19 to 38 kinda sucks
      b) His muscle mass will be negligable. After being in a cast for only 3-4 weeks after an ankle break my leg muscles had shrunk and strength decreased noticably
      c) He's got a lot of educational catching up to do. Hopefully he worked as a carpenter, plumber, or some other job where old skills are still useful with some upgrading (if he was into computers 19 years ago he's gonna be way behind)
      d) Likely there's still a bit of other funkiness with his body after 19 years and major brain damage.
      e) Scientists are going to poke and prod him to research this regeneration.

      On the plus side:

      a) Medicine should be a bit better than it was then
      b) Technology in many cases will be pretty cool. Even if he's bedridden for a long time it'll likely be a wonder for him to try out a modern console
      c) That first post-vegetitive shower is going to be really nice
      d) Add to that a real dinner after being on hospital food and drips for 19 years...
      e) Somebody with a brain that regenerates that well will be of interest to science, which is annoying but possibly good for paying the bills.
      • Now there is this case of a man who was declared by experts to be in a permanent minimally-conscious state waking up after 19 years. Makes me wonder if letting treatment continue wouldn't be such a bad idea. What if you got a second chance to live?

        Blow that for a game of soldiers. If I woke up after 19 years in a coma, my first question would be why didn't someone hadn't pulled the plug/ removed the tube yet.

        A full recovery never happens, except in movies. People don't just wake up from a coma. The damage affects them for the rest of their lives. After 19 years, the person you knew would be a stranger to you anyway, and there's not much of that person left.

        I wouldn't want anyone close to me to waste their lives praying over a vegetable for 19 years in the hope that a half-me will wake up to be taken care of in much the same way. There comes a point when modern medicine stops saving people's lives and is simply prolonging suffering, both for the victim and their family. It's not easy to gauge when that line gets crossed, but when it has been, its time to let go.

      • Re:At the risk of fanning a fire... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2006, @11:27AM (#15656531)
        the young woman who was, like this gentleman, in what many people called a "persistent vegetative state".

        While Schiavo was in a vegetative state and had no hope for recovery, this man was in a minimally conscious state. If this man had been in a persistent vegetative state, he would not be recovering (albeit very slowly and with little hope of his former abilities) today. It is a significant mistake to equate these two states.

        Would there ever be a chance S[c]hiavo could've recovered like this man did?

        No.

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