What is the vegetative state?
Complete absence of behavioral evidence
for self or environmental awareness
- The capacity for spontaneous or stimulus–induced
arousal is preserved, evidenced by sleep–wake cycles i.e. patients are
awake, but have no awareness. This means that the patients appear awake.
- They have normal heart beat and breathing, and do not
require advanced life support to preserve life and cannot produce a
purposeful, co–coordinated, voluntary response in a sustained manner,
although they may have primitive reflexive responses to light, sound,
touch or pain.
- They cannot understand, communicate, speak, or have
emotions and unaware of self and environment and have no interaction with
voluntarily control passing of urine or stools. They sleep and awaken. As
the centers in the brain controlling the heart and breathing are intact,
there is no threat to life, and patients can survive for many years with
expert nursing care.
- The following behaviors may be seen in the vegetative
state: Sleep–wake cycles with eyes closed, then opened. Patient breathes
on her own; Spontaneous blinking and roving eye movements; Produce sounds
but no words; Visual pursuit following an object with her eyes; Grimacing
to pain; changing facial expression; Yawning; chewing jaw movements
Swallowing of her own spit No purposeful limb movements; arching of back;
reflex withdrawal from painful stimuli; brief movements of head or eyes
toward sound or movement without apparent localization or fixation;
startles with a loud sound.
Almost all of these features consistent
with the diagnosis of permanent vegetative state were present during the
medical examination of Aruna Shaunbag. Behavior suggestive of a minimally
conscious not vegetative state was observed during the examination.
No comments:
Post a Comment