Free full text is available for the paper in the Feb 4 NEJM, entitled:
These are the data I've been waiting for!
In brief: they report fMRI imaging of 54 patients in VS and MCS, using the mental imagery protocol that was described in Adrian Owen's Nature report (I think one of the patients in this paper is the same patient?)
It looks to me like they got "hits" on both the motor imagery and the spatial imagery task for four patients. In one patient, they got a hit on the motor task but not the spatial imagery task, which may be why they say "five patients" in the abstract.
All five of those patients had traumatic injury (not anoxic or stroke.) The four who got two hits were all in their 20s, and their insult happened 1, 6, 30, and 61 months prior to the scans. I think patient #23 in their table is Rom Houben.
They asked one of the two-hits patients (a 22 year old man in VS, 61 months out from TBI,) to do answer yes-no autobiographical questions, and got 5 out of 6 correct--the sixth was not an incorrect answer, but "no activity."
Okay, this is news to digest. All the reports until now have either lacked detail, or have only shown evidence of awareness in young patients less than 12 months after TBI (a group of patients who still have reasonable odds of emerging from VS.)
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I can't even begin to understand all this medical mumbo jumbo but Jeff and I were discussing this issue in relation to setting up our wills. Even if my brain can decipher between 'tennis' and 'walking around my house' I still say "pull the plug."
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