![]() ![]() ![]() In Gallagher's 30 years of treating dying patients, she has witnessed positive reactions in people when loved ones spoke to them in their final moments. Thirteen families participated and brain recordings were obtained from five patients when they were unresponsive. The research required patients to give their consent in advance. Romayne Gallagher, a palliative care physician at St. The UBC researchers applied a similar paradigm to actively dying unresponsive patients.īlundon and Ward collaborated with Dr. This study was adapted from a European study that explored brain responses to sound in individual healthy participants, and in minimally conscious and unresponsive brain-injured patients. "We had to look very carefully at the individual control participants' data, to see if each one of them showed a particular type of brain response before we felt confident that the unresponsive patient's brain reacted similarly." "We were able to identify specific cognitive processes from the neuro-typical participants as well as the hospice patients," says Lawrence Ward, a professor in the department of psychology at UBC. The researchers monitored the brain's response to those tones using EEG and found that some dying patients responded similarly to the young, healthy controls - even when they were hours away from death. When the rare tone pattern occurred, both groups responded by giving a pre-arranged signal. The researchers introduced study participants to various patterns of common and rare sounds that changed frequency. This new insight into the dying brain's response to sound can help family and friends bring comfort to a person in their final moments. "Our data shows that a dying brain can respond to sound, even in an unconscious state, up to the last hours of life." "In the last hours before an expected natural death, many people enter a period of unresponsiveness," says study lead author Elizabeth Blundon, who was a PhD student in the department of psychology at the time of the study. The patients were receiving palliative care at St. ![]() Using electroencephalography (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the brain, the researchers analyzed data collected from healthy control participants, from hospice patients when they were conscious, and from the same hospice patients when they became unresponsive. This research, published recently in Scientific Reports, is the first to investigate hearing in humans when they are close to death. ![]()
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