By Nancy Frazier O’Brien
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) — New evidence of brain activity in patients judged to be in a persistent vegetative state should make physicians and neurologists more cautious in arriving at such judgments in the future, according to a Catholic ethicist.

Edward Furton, a staff ethicist and director of publications at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, said March 1 that recent research shows doctors sometimes “underestimate the consciousness of patients,” who can be “more aware than they are given credit for.”

In a study published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers in England and Belgium found that five of 54 patients in states of persistent unconsciousness showed distinct patterns of brain activity on a brain imaging machine in response to questions that required a “yes” or “no” answer.

Four of the responsive patients studied had been diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, while the fifth had been considered minimally conscious. The other 49 patients in the study showed no signs of conscious brain activity.

“These results show a small proportion of patients in a vegetative or minimally conscious state have brain activation reflecting some awareness and cognition,” the study concluded. “Careful clinical examination will result in reclassification of the state of consciousness in some of these patients.”

The researchers said the technique used in the study “may be useful in establishing basic communication with patients who appear to be unresponsive.”

Furton said the misperceptions about the awareness of those in persistent vegetative states is similar to scientists’ earlier beliefs about fetal pain. Some contended that a fetus could not feel pain until shortly before birth, “but that has been shown to be false,” he said.

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