'Breakthrough in communication for patients with severe MND', study claims

Conclusion It's hard to imagine the situation of being alert, aware of what's happening around you, but unable to move, respond or communicate with the outside world. So it is comforting, then, to hear that people with complete locked-in syndrome may be able to communicate – and may be relatively content with their situation. However, it's important to remember the limitations of this study. It's very small. Only four people took part, and full results are available for only three of them. The results may only apply to people with this very specific type of neurodegenerative disease, not to people with other types of paralysis or locked-in syndromes like those caused by a stroke or head injury. People in the study were all being given intense nursing care in their homes, looked after by family members. They had all chosen to have artificial respiration – in other words, had chosen to live with locked-in syndrome rather than to allow nature to take its course. That might affect how they answer questions about quality of life. It's hard to know how accurate the results of the study are. We can't directly test them, so we have to rely on likelihood and chance of people repeatedly giving the same answers, and the computer reading the patterns correctly. As the authors note, we do not know why the oxygenation results would be different for "yes" and "no" answers. There was also no clear pattern in the responses between patients, which would be expected if...
Source: NHS News Feed - Category: Consumer Health News Tags: Neurology Source Type: news