Latest coma Stories

(Please read in seventh paragraph ... and was on dialysis to help his kidneys. He was also being treated for damage to his liver ... instead of ... and was on dialysis because of some liver damage.) By Jon Hurdle BUCKHANNON, W., Virginia (Reuters) - The sole survivor of a mine disaster that killed 12 men lay in a coma on Thursday as residents of the tight-knit West Virginia community struggled to understand the latest tragedy in the history of this dangerous profession. But doctors...

Researcher says viewers could gain unrealistic expectations of conditionWhen is a coma nothing like a coma?When it's a fictional coma, as depicted on the wildly popular daytime dramas warming the electronic hearths of America's living rooms.A new study suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that soaped-up comas are fanciful constructs that have little to do with the real thing -- leading the public to draw false conclusions about the true and serious nature of an actual coma."It's unnerving...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A drop in levels of blood sugar, called hypoglycemia, that are severe enough to cause seizures or coma in young children with type 1 diabetes does not appear to result in impairments in mental ability (cognition) or behavior, according to results of a new study. Among children with type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile diabetes, those who develop the disease very early in life have shown signs of declines in mental abilities, Dr. Timothy W. Jones, from...

By Phil Stewart ROME (Reuters) - An Italian man who spent two years supposedly unconscious in a deep coma, written off by doctors as nearly-dead, awoke saying he heard and understood everything happening around him during the long ordeal, his family said. Salvatore Crisafulli, a father of four, is describing his case as a "miracle" which proves that lost causes are anything but hopeless and his recovery appeared to strengthen the hand of Italians opposed to end-of-life solutions. Even...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former world lightweight champion Leavander Johnson died in hospital on Thursday, five days after suffering brain damage in a title bout in Las Vegas. The 35-year-old American collapsed while heading to his dressing room after he was stopped in the 11th round of a failed IBF lightweight title defense against Mexico's Jesus Chavez on Saturday. Johnson was rushed to hospital with bleeding on the brain, where doctors performed emergency surgery, but he never regained...

By Philip Pullella VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - In an act of unusual transparency, the Vatican has published a graphically descriptive behind-the-scene account of Pope John Paul's final days, hours and minutes. According to a new Vatican volume that chronicles the last two months of his life, the Pope's last comprehensible words were "Let me go to the house of the Father." He uttered the phrase in Polish in a barely audible voice to aides about three and a half hours before he slipped into...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic neurologists have created the first new, reliable and easy-to-use clinical tool in 30 years for measuring coma depth, a proposed replacement for the Glasgow Coma Scale. The new scoring system, called the FOUR (Full Outline of UnResponsiveness) Score, will be described in the October issue of Annals of Neurology, to be published online Friday, Sept. 9. When using the FOUR Score, evaluators assign a score of zero to four in each of four categories, including eye,...

Through the night of 4 July 2005, all European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes observed the effects of the impact on Comet 9P/Tempel 1. At sunset in Chile, the seven telescopes of the La Silla Paranal Observatory went into action. The FORS2 multi-mode instrument on Antu, one of the 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) array, took stunning images, showing that the morphology of the comet had dramatically changed: a new bright fan-like structure was now visible. The...

By Nichola Groom PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) - A NASA spacecraft is "healthyand ready" for its July 4 collision with a comet and hasalready provided images critical to understanding the buildingblocks of life on Earth, officials said on Friday. While still roughly 1.5 million miles from its target, thefast-moving Deep Impact craft is on track for its Saturdayrelease of a coffee-table sized impactor that is expected toblast a stadium-sized crater into comet Tempel 1. "Both the fly-by and the...

Cambridge, MA -- The Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS) has been asleep on orbit for the past 11 months. SWAS operators placed it into hibernation after a highly successful 5.5-year mission highlighted by the discovery of a swarm of comets evaporating around an aging red giant star. Now, they have awakened SWAS again for the first-ever opportunity to study a comet on a collision course with a U.S. space probe. "We knew there was life left in SWAS," said SWAS Principal...