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.
Stage 1: Unresponsiveness:
Patients in the unresponsive stage rarely respond in the same way throughout time. Those who are entirely unresponsive are said to be in a coma. Patients in the unresponsive period may respond reflexively or make confusing gestures.
People in a state of coma are alive but are unable to move or be aware of or respond to their surroundings. They lose their thinking abilities but retain non-cognitive function and normal sleep patterns. A person may appear fine, but will not able to speak or respond to commands.
Can Your Loved One Hear You? During a coma, the individual is unconscious, meaning they are unable to respond to any sounds. However, the brain may still be able to pick up on sounds from loved ones. In fact, some studies suggest talking and touching a loved one while they are in a coma may help them recover.
Usually, coma patients have their eyes closed and cannot see what happens around them. But their ears keep receiving sounds from the environment. In some cases, the brains of coma patients can process sounds, for example the voice of someone speaking to them [2].
As many as 15 to 20 percent of patients who appear to be in a coma or other unresponsive state show these inner signs of awareness when evaluated with advanced brain-imaging methods or sophisticated monitoring of electrical activity.
Use objects with pleasant tactile sensations and different textures such as soft toys, silk scarves or books. Put a bunch of flowers in the person's room or spray their favourite perfume.
Severe brain injury is usually defined as being a condition where the patient has been in an unconscious state for 6 hours or more, or a post-traumatic amnesia of 24 hours or more. These patients are likely to be hospitalised and receive rehabilitation once the acute phase has passed.
The chances of someone recovering from a coma largely depend on the severity and cause of their brain injury, their age and how long they've been in a coma. But it's impossible to accurately predict whether the person will eventually recover, how long the coma will last and whether they'll have any long-term problems.
Comatose patients rely heavily on their caretakers to bathe them, change them, and clean them if they soil themselves. If a patient is allowed to remain soiled, urine and feces can degrade the skin and increase the risk of a pressure sore as well as become a serious infection if there is already an open sore present.
Routine treatment
Keeping them alive requires good basic care (such as turning and changing position to manage skin integrity), a feeding tube, intermittent antibiotics for infections and perhaps some ongoing mechanical ventilation support (such as oxygen at night).
The length of time a patient is in a medically induced coma is "largely dependent on the disease that you're treating," Souter said. In most cases, a coma is induced for a few days up to two weeks; induced comas longer than a month are extremely rare.
While trying to save your life, doctors may induce a coma. A medically induced coma effectively shuts down the patient's brain. As such, this medical course of action is a serious step in the treatment of individuals. Typically, doctors use the tactic to treat those who have suffered a serious traumatic brain injury.
The majority of people (87 percent) who score a three or a four on the scale within the first 24 hours of going into a coma are likely to either die or remain in a vegetative state. On the other end of the scale, about 87 percent of those who score between 11 and 15 are likely to make a good recovery.
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.
The patient in the deepest coma will show some EEG electroactivity, while the brain-dead patient will not.
A person who is brain dead is dead, with no chance of revival. Coma: A state of profound unresponsiveness as a result of severe illness or brain injury. Patients in a coma do not open their eyes or speak, and they do not exhibit purposeful behaviors.
People who do wake up from a coma usually come round gradually. They may be very agitated and confused to begin with. Some people will make a full recovery and be completely unaffected by the coma. Others will have disabilities caused by the damage to their brain.
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.
'Coma patients can be subdivided into several types,' said Dr Guger. 'People who are genuinely in a coma have no cognitive function and no motor responses – they cannot think and they cannot move. But some people may appear to be in a coma even though they are in fact conscious to some degree. '