Question:
I don't have time to read the article now, but I do know the Minnesota neurologist who testified in the Schiavo case and who is considered one of the leading neurologists and experts on PVS in the world said no one who has been in a PVS longer than 3 mos. has ever been known to make a recovery. If there's any hope of recovery, it happens in the first 3 mos. or forget it. Does this woman say how long she was supposedly in a PVS? Which obviously was a misdiagnosis. I think the bottom line for Ms. Schiavo is not just time, but the condition of her brain. According to the CT scans and MRIs, most of the cerebral cortex is gone, w/ spinal fluid filling her skull in its place. The brain does not regenerate the way a liver does. There's no coming back from a brain injury that severe.

I was reading this article about PVS and severe traumatic brain injury and it was chilling...and depressing. The author theorized it could be possible in STBI rendering a PVS that there's some kind of auditory and visual sensory --- that is, the brain stem (the part of the brain still functioning) is on some level registering auditory and visual stimuli reaching it via nerve pathways. But that w/o the cerebral cortex, which controls all the higher functions of the brain like analysis and interpretation, there's nothing there to interpret or make sense of this stimuli. IOW, the only registry of sound might be a very loud sound that stimulates a startle reflex, and "vision" might be light and darkness and a movement of shapes w/ no form or meaning.

Answer: The vegetative state is a clinical condition of complete unawareness of the self and the environment, accompanied by sleep-wake cycles, with either complete or partial preservation of hypothalamic and brain-stem autonomic functions. In addition, patients in a vegetative state show no evidence of sustained, reproducible, purposeful, or voluntary behavioral responses to visual, auditory, tactile, or noxious stimuli; show no evidence of language comprehension or expression; have bowel and bladder incontinence; and have variably preserved cranial-nerve and spinal reflexes. We define persistent vegetative state as a vegetative state present one month after acute traumatic or nontraumatic brain injury or lasting for at least one month in patients with degenerative or metabolic disorders or developmental malformations.

The clinical course and outcome of a persistent vegetative state depend on its cause. Three categories of disorder can cause such a state: acute traumatic and nontraumatic brain injuries, degenerative and metabolic brain disorders, and severe congenital malformations of the nervous system.