He was in a clinically certified comatose state for 23 years! But he was conscious all, or most of the time. This is the strange story of Mr Rom Houben, a Belgian who was born in 1963 and suffered a car crash in 1983 that left him in a coma. Or did it?
In 2016, Dr. Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liege in Belgium decided to investigate comatose patients using the latest scanning technologies. His study, published in BMC Neurology, found that Mr. Houben could be one of many cases of falsely diagnosed coma patients.
“It is possible that Mr. Houben experienced emotions over all those years,” Dr. Lureys told Scientific American in an interview published on Aug 23, 2018. “He was the first of our patients who was given a different diagnosis after such a long time. We subsequently conducted a study in several Belgian rehab centers and found that 30% to 40% of unresponsive patients may exhibit signs of consciousness.”
Some of these patients would be in a false state of coma, called LIS (Locked-in Syndrome) or Pseudocoma. The EEG is normal in locked-in syndrome.
There are two categories in LIS. In one, the comatose patient is aware that s/he is conscious but cannot move or communicate due to complete paralysis of nearly all voluntary muscles in the body except for vertical eye movements and maybe blinking. Such cases can be detected by doctors if they take the time and effort.
But it is the hardcore or CLIS (Completely Locked-in Syndrome) that’s impossible to detect. In CLIS, the eyes are paralyzed as well. However, minute movements in the pupils can be detected by infrared cameras and other sensitive devices.
“In the future, it may be possible to read brain signals using scalp electrodes and a brain-computer interface,” Dr. Laureys told Scientific American. “This would make communication much quicker and less costly than with a brain scanner. We have also found that it is possible to examine a person’s pupils: we ask patients to multiply 23 by 17 if they intend to say yes. This difficult problem causes the patients to concentrate, and their pupils will dilate slightly as a result. If we direct a camera at their eyes and a computer analyzes the signals, we can determine quite quickly whether the intended answer is positive or negative.”
This research could give a whole new meaning to comatose consciousness and possibly redefine what it means to be clinically dead – sometime in the future.