JOHN LEO'S BLOG

A news story in today's Guardian says that a drug commonly used as a sleeping pill has been used to revive–temporarily–three patients who had been in a persistent vegetative state for years. The three patients are all males around age 30. Within 20 minutes of being given the drug Zolpidem, according to the report, the men awaken, then after four hours, the drug wears off and the patients relapse back into a vegetative state. One of the men was able to interact with his family, answer simple questions, and catch a baseball. Ralf Clauss of the nuclear medicine department of the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Britain said Zolpidem could have uses in all kinds of brain damage, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

The Guardian story comes from a technical article in the journal Neurorehabilitation. The abstract of this article is free, but the full text must be purchased.