Coma and Disorders of Consciousness (eBook)

Coma and Disorders of Consciousness, 3e is a fully revised new edition offering a comprehensive review of the field for clinicians and researchers in the field of disorders of consciousness.

Caring for patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) such as unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (vegetative state) or minimally conscious state and related conditions such as locked-in syndrome currently represent a financial, medical and ethical conundrum. Although severe brain injuries represent a fraction of the population with brain injury, their cost is enormous (around $4 billion in direct medical costs per year), mostly due to the long-term care they need. The impressive number of studies performed on disorders of consciousness in the last decade has allowed refining diagnosis criteria, acquiring a better understanding of prognosis, and developing new tools to care and treat this challenging population. In this context, recently published milestone papers have provided new guidelines to clinicians for managing patients with DOC. This should lead to a shift in mentality and in the way we care for these patients. 

This book brings together researchers and clinicians to write about recent and future changes that will altogether improve the outcome of patients with DOC.

Dr Schnakers has been working as a clinical scientist in the neurorehabilitation field for the past 15 years. She focuses her research on brain-injured patients with Disorders of Consciousness (DOC) and, more particularly, on the assessment of their brain activity and cognitive functions using behavioral, electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques. She has published more than 100 articles (H-index: 52) in international peer reviewed journals such as Neurology, Annals of Neurology, Nature Reviews Neurology and Lancet. She serves as the chair of the Special Interest Group on DOC for the International Brain Injury Association and she is actively involved in the Curing Coma Campaign. She currently works as assistant director at the Research Institute of Casa Colina Hospital and Centers for Healthcare (Pomona, CA).