Ambien Wakes Up Patients in Persistent Vegetative State

[billroper]

Via Patterico, an article from the Guardian about how the sleeping pill, Ambien, seems to wake some severely brain damaged patients up from their permanent vegetative state.

Comments

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Huh. I don't know exactly what to make of this. It's interesting, and certainly good for the families (and patients), but...it certainly makes the ethics of it all much more complicated. My father and I both agreed that neither of us wish to be kept alive in a vegetative state; that to all intents and purposes we would no longer be ourselves. This complicates matters. We still wouldn't be ourselves...but there's the possibility we could be later?

I suppose if this really works and gets widespread it'd eliminate the problem, because people wouldn't stay in persistent vegatative states.

Interesting.

[billroper]

I suspect that there will be some people who are so profoundly brain-damaged that nothing will help them. But for people who still have the circuitry available to "rewire" around the damage, this looks like it could be a really good thing.

I sent a note about this to a friend of mine with ataxia on the chance that the type of brain damage that he's got could be positively affected by this. We'll see what happens.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

To actually be able to bring people back from persistent vegetative state would be a great medical advance, but I hope that it comes with improvements in diagnosis, because I'm sure there will be some that it can't help, and I don't want some people's simpleminded approach to ethics to require that we maintain the empty bodies. If it's me, I want real science to decide if I can be helped, and if not, I don't want my body hanging around in a parody of life.

[madfilkentist]

Given the state of science reporting, I'd like to see more information before getting too optimistic. The state of the patients' brain damage could be exaggerated, for example.

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

Wow! And I got to totally croggle my son's shrink with this today (son is getting Ambien scrip). At first I think he thought it was a total hoax, but I explained how it interferes with GABA and he actually thought that made sense.

Can't wait to see Science News's take on it.