Inconsistencies in the treatment of disorders of consciousness: 200+ professionals surveyed
Research on patients who have impaired consciousness, especially those who acquired severe brain injury or who have suffered from prolonged disorders of consciousness, has exploded in the last decade, not least within the Human Brain Project. With two international guidelines (one from Europe and one from the United States) available to facilitate care for these…
Measuring & describing consciousness: clinical tool and theoretical model prove compatible
The debate on how to describe consciousness is lively in the research community. A recent paper in Neuroscience of Consciousness develops an analytical comparison between a clinical tool for assessing residual conscious activity, the so-called Perturbational Complexity Index, and a theoretical model of consciousness that is different from the one that inspired it, the Global…
Emerging ethical issues in research on consciousness
A recent special issue of the American Journal of Bioethics – Neuroscience offers analyses of different ethical issues raised by research on consciousness. Contributions from international scholars in the field address challenges ranging from moral interpretations, technological manipulations, artificial replications, pharmacological alternations and the potential to attribute consciousness to engineered brain cells. The issue is…
Responsibility key to implementing guidelines for treating disorders of consciousness
A disorder of consciousness is a state where consciousness has been affected by devastating damage to the brain. The diagnosis and health care of patients suffering from these disorders raise several clinical as well as ethical issues. And researchers are still looking for ways to solve them. Recent guidelines, European and American, offer important recommendations…
Indicators and criteria of consciousness for behaviourally unresponsive patients
Identifying and quantifying residual consciousness in patients with disorders of consciousness is notoriously challenging but increasingly urgent. There is a high rate of misdiagnosis among patients suffering from these disorders, particularly between vegetative states/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome and minimally conscious states. A recent BMC Medical Ethics publication explores how operational indicators previously introduced to assess consciousness…
Calling all professionals working with Disorders of Consciousness!
As part of the International Brain Injury Association’s Disorders of Consciousness Special Interest Group, we invite professionals working in the field to request their participation in a survey. The intent is to explore professional opinions relevant to the recommendations included in the newly issued Guidelines on Disorders of Consciousness from the European Academy of Neurology…
Are you conscious? Looking for reliable indicators
How can we be sure that a person in front of us is conscious? This might seem like a näive question, but it actually resulted in one of the trickiest and most intriguing philosophical problems, classically known as “the other minds problem.” Yet this is more than just a philosophical game: reliable detection of conscious…