Brain death is not the same as coma, because someone in a coma is unconscious but still alive. Brain death occurs when a critically ill patient dies sometime after being placed on life support.
A coma is a deep state of eyes-closed unconsciousness where a person is not able to respond to people or the environment around them. In a coma, a patient is alive and there is some brain activity. Depending on the severity of the injury, recovery time varies and comas can be temporary or permanent.
A person lying in comma neither responds to environmental stimuli nor has self-consciousness. He/she is supported by machines to carry out the vital life processes and he/she is brain-dead. Some of these patients never come back to normal life. Such persons can neither be considered as living nor non-living.
Are Patients with No Self-Consciousness Living or Non-Living? Patients who have no self-consciousness are usually in a vegetative state or coma. They are alive, but they are not conscious of their surroundings or themselves.
A: Many people who have woken up from comas have reported having dreams in which they saw something from the outer world. Others have had dreams that seemed to stretch on and on. A person's ability to dream is most likely determined by the underlying medical condition that put them in a coma.
A coma is similar to a dream-like state because the individual is alive but not conscious. A coma occurs when there is little-to-no brain activity. The patient is unable to respond to touch, sound, and other stimuli. It is also rare for someone in a coma to cough, sneeze, or communicate in any way.
Comatose patients do not seem to hear or respond. Speaking may not affect their clinical outcome; time spent with them takes time away from other, more "viable" patients. Comatose patients may, however, hear; many have normal brain-stem auditory evoked responses and normal physiologic responses to auditory stimuli.
The standard definition of a comatose patient is someone who is unconscious, is unable to be awakened, and has no signs of awareness or the ability to interact with the environment.
The brain stem also relays information to and from the brain to the rest of the body, so it plays an important role in the brain's core functions, such as consciousness, awareness and movement. After brain death, it's not possible for someone to remain conscious.
Hence, we can conclude that the patients lying in coma satisfy some living criterias. However, they have non-living features in behavioural and social aspects. Q. Assertion :Brian-dead patient lying in coma has no self-consciousness.
Typically, a coma does not last more than a few days or couple of weeks. In some rare cases, a person might stay in a coma for several weeks, months or even years. Depending on what caused the person to go into a coma, some patients are able to return to their normal lives after leaving the hospital.
Coma is a state of consciousness that is similar to deep sleep, except no amount of external stimuli (such as sounds or sensations) can prompt the brain to become awake and alert. A person in a coma can't even respond to pain.
The symptoms of a coma commonly include: Closed eyes. Depressed brainstem reflexes, such as pupils not responding to light. No responses of limbs except for reflex movements.
A coma can be classified as (1) supratentorial (above Tentorium cerebelli), (2) infratentorial (below Tentorium cerebelli), (3) metabolic or (4) diffused. This classification is merely dependent on the position of the original damage that caused the coma, and does not correlate with severity or the prognosis.
But without brain function, the body eventually shuts down, unless there is medical intervention. Someone on a ventilator may appear to be breathing, but cannot breathe on their own. While the heart usually stops within 72 hours, it could continue beating for “a week or so,” Varelas said.
Can someone hear while on life support? It's hard to say for sure whether people on life support can hear their loved ones and healthcare providers. Small studies suggest it's possible. This probably depends on the level of sedation and how severe any possible brain injury is.
The first organ system to “close down” is the digestive system. Digestion is a lot of work! In the last few weeks, there is really no need to process food to build new cells. That energy needs to go elsewhere.
Brain dead patients look asleep, but they are not. They do not hear or feel anything, including pain. This is because the parts of the brain that feel, sense, and respond to the world no longer work. In addition, the brain can no longer tell the body to breathe.
Well, be amazed as this actually happened to a teenager British teenager. 18-year-old Lewis Roberts, from Leek, Staffordshire, was declared brain dead after being hit by a van. But he blinked and started breathing on his own hours before his organs were due to be donated.
Annie Shapiro (1913–2003) was a Canadian apron shop owner who was in a coma for 29 years because of a massive stroke and suddenly awakened in 1992. Apart from the patients in the true story Awakenings, Shapiro was the longest a person has been in a coma like state and woken up.
A coma stimulation programme (sometimes called a coma arousal programme) is an approach based on stimulating the unconscious person's senses of hearing, touch, smell, taste and vision individually in order to help their recovery.
Nobody knows exactly what happens in a coma. Some scientists believe coma patients don't see or feel or hear a thing. Others say something different. Some scientists believe that coma patients actually dream.
It's very unusual for a coma to last more than a few weeks at most. People in a coma are completely unresponsive. They do not move, do not react to light or sound and cannot feel pain. Their eyes are closed.
When Edwarda O'Bara died on 21 November 2012, she had survived 15,663 days (about 42 years) in a coma. Born in 1953, in Miami, Florida, O'Bara suffered a childhood history of diabetes, which she successfully managed with insulin.