Researcher attempts to ‘wake’ brain-dead patients

Eight years ago, four doctors declared Steven Thorpe, then 17 years old, brain dead.

“I was out of the hospital seven weeks later,” he told BBC News.

Doctors also declared high school freshman Taylor Hale brain dead in 2011 after she suffered a traumatic brain injury and hemorrhage. After a family friend prayed for her, doctors took the teen off life support and told her parents it was time to say good-bye. A few hours later, Hale woke up, The Des Moines Register reported. Last year, she graduated high school on time with her peers.

Thorpe and Hale are just two cases among several that highlight the complexity of brain death. Now Ira Pastor, chief executive of Philadelphia-based Bioquark, has announced plans to attempt to regenerate the nervous systems of 20 brain-dead patients in India. During six-week trials, researchers will continuously infuse a biochemical cocktail into an area around the patients’ spinal cords and will administer stem cells every two weeks.

Pastor believes brain death is a potentially curable condition.

“Given the right combination of stem cells, drugs, electric current, magnetic fields, or other stimuli, the mind may have the power to reawaken,” he told The Washington Post.

The research is very preliminary and Pastor is clear that his initial experiments won’t awaken any brain-dead patients. This first stage will likely produce, at best, subtle changes that can only be detected by blood and spinal fluid testing or MRI. Pastor hopes the study may lead to applications for treating things such as spinal cord injuries, Alzheimer’s disease, mental illness, or traumatic brain injury.

But Robert Cranston, a neurologist at the Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana, Ill., and a member of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, is skeptical that any scientific breakthrough will ever reverse brain death.

Stories about brain dead patients suddenly awakening usually involve patients who are not really brain dead but are actually in a persistent vegetative state, Cranston said.

“To my knowledge, there haven’t been any cases where someone was clearly brain dead and came back to any quality of life,” he said.

Cranston cautions even if it becomes possible to awaken the brain-dead, it is highly likely they would return to a very poor quality of life, or to a persistent vegetative state.

The Uniform Determination of Death Act, adopted in all 50 states, defines brain death as irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem. Patients in a persistent vegetative state have measurable brain activity, some reflex function, and can often breath without medical assistance.

“In contrast, people who have experienced total brain failure exhibit none of these properties of living persons,” noted Wesley Smith, author and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.

Smith is also highly doubtful that brain death, a condition that by definition is irreversible, could ever be reversed.

“It seems more likely that these interventions, if successful, will not reverse death, but potentially treat profound brain injury,” he wrote in National Review.

But Cranston doesn’t entirely rule out the possibility of reversing brain death at some point in the future.

“I think it is very unlikely we will ever be able to wake these individuals up to any quality of life, or if it is going to happen, it’s 20 years down the road,” he said. “About all you can really say is, ‘stay tuned.’”