Month: August 2020

Surprising New Test for Predicting Recovery after Coma

nancyvalko brain injury, disability, medical ethics, nursing

An April 29, 2020 Nature Journal article titled “Olfactory sniffing signals consciousness in unresponsive patients with brain injuries” found that nasal response to odors (sniffing) by 43 severely brain-injured patients predicted the likelihood of recovery and long-term survival.

According to Noam Sobel, PhD, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, one of the authors of the article and speaking to MedpageToday:

“If you sniff at an odorant, then it’s 100% you will regain consciousness to at least a minimal level, and you will likely live for years,” he told MedPage Today. “If you don’t sniff at an odorant, that is a bad sign, but not all hope is lost.” (Emphasis added)

Amazingly, he said that 37.5% of the unresponsive patients who didn’t sniff did eventually regain consciousness.

Dr. Giacino, PhD of Harvard Medical School who helped write the 2018 American Academy of Neurology guidance on disorders of consciousness told Medpage that this study is “a cleverly and carefully designed study that adds another much-needed tool to the consciousness-detection toolbox” even though “Between 30% and 60% of patients who sustain severe TBI (traumatic brain injury) have diminished or complete loss of smell due to the mechanics of the injury.”)

He also noted that, based on available evidence, about four in 10 patients who are deemed unconscious on bedside examination actually retain conscious awareness and that “A significant portion of these patients have covert consciousness — preserved cognitive function that cannot be expressed through speech or movement.” (Emphasis added)

WHY IS THIS STUDY SO IMPORTANT?

As Dr. Giacino said in the Medpage article:

“Published evidence from Canada in a large cohort of ICU patients with traumatic brain injury [TBI] found that approximately 70% of the deaths were due to withdrawal of treatment and in about 60% of cases, the decision to stop treatment was made within 72 hours,” he said. “It’s possible that a positive sniff test might delay this decision, which is important since we know that about 20% of TBI patients who survive what appears to be catastrophic injury recover to a functionally-independent level by 5 years post-injury.” (Emphasis added)

As we have seen over the past decades, whether or not a severely brain-injured person is or can become conscious has become a life and death matter. We have seen this in the cases of Nancy Cruzan, Terri Schiavo and Zach Dunlap even though, as I wrote in my August 18, 2018 blog, “Medical Experts Now Agree that Severely Brain-injured Patients are Often Misdiagnosed and May Recover”.

THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN CLOSE TO MY HEART FOR DECADES.

Just before Drs. Jennet and Plum invented the term “persistent vegetative state” in 1972,  I started working with many comatose patients as a young ICU nurse. Despite the skepticism of my colleagues, I talked to these patients as if they were awake because I believed it was worth doing, especially if it is true that hearing is the last sense to go. And why not do it to respect the patient as a person?

Then one day a 17 year old young man I will call “Mike” was admitted to our ICU in a coma and on a ventilator after a horrific car accident. The neurosurgeon who examined him predicted he would be dead by morning or become a “vegetable.” The doctor recommended that he not be resuscitated if his heart stopped.

But “Mike” didn’t die and almost 2 years later returned to our ICU fully recovered and told us that he would only respond to me at first and refused to respond to the doctor because he was angry when heard the doctor call him a “vegetable” when the doctor assumed ‘Mike” was comatose!

After that, every nurse was told to treat all our coma patients as if they were fully awake. We were rewarded when several other coma patients later woke up.

Over the years, I’ve written about several other patients like “Jack”, “Katie” and “Chris” in comas or “persistent vegetative states” who regained full or some consciousness with verbal and physical stimulation. I have also recommended Jane Hoyt’s wonderful 1994 pamphlet “A Gentle Approach-Interacting with a Person who is Semi-Conscious  or Presumed in Coma” to help families and others stimulate consciousness. Personally, I have only seen one person who did not improve from the so-called “vegetative” state during the approximately two years I saw him.

CONCLUSION

But I never even thought to give any of my patients a sniff test. What a simple test for medical professionals to do!

And even though this study is small and needs to be replicated and validated, I believe it is further evidence that we need to reevaluate our current medical ethics and laws that allow life-sustaining treatment to be withdrawn from people with severe brain injuries on the premise that such brain-injured people have no “quality of life” and that such injuries are routinely hopeless.

And I hope that the sniff test can become a standard part of all medical evaluations of people with severe brain injuries.

The World Brain Death Project: What It Means

nancyvalko brain death, end-of-life, futility, law, medical ethics, organ donation, ventilators/life support

THE HISTORY OF BRAIN DEATH

In December of 1967, the first successful heart transplant was performed in South Africa by Dr. Christian Barnard. At that time, there were no guidelines for the diagnosis of death for beating heart donors.

In September of 1968, the Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death was published with the purpose of defining irreversible coma as a new criterion for death.

This was done for two stated  reasons:

  1. “Improvements in resuscitative and supportive measures have led to increase efforts to save those who are desperately injured. Sometimes these efforts have only partial success so that the result is an individual  whose heart continues to beat but whose brain is irreversibly damaged. The burden is great on patients who suffer permanent loss of intellect, on their families, on the hospitals and on those in need of hospital beds already occupied by these comatose patients.“
  2. “Obsolete criteria for the definition of death can lead to controversy in obtaining organs for transplantation.” (All emphasis added)

This report was quickly accepted by many and in 1968, the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act was passed in the US  as a regulatory framework for the donation of organs, tissues and other human body parts. The Act allowed the donation of whole or part of a human body to take effect upon or after the death of the donor.

The Uniform Declaration of Death Act (UDDA) was drafted in 1981 by a President’s Commission study to brain death and approved by both the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Bar Association (ABA). It was intended to provide a model for states to emulate.

It offered 2 definitions of when a person could be declared legally dead to align the legal definition of death with the criteria largely accepted by the medical community:

  1. “Irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions (the traditional definition of death); or
  2. Irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem (brain death)” (Emphasis added)

The UDDA in some form has since been adopted by all US states and the District of Columbia.

However, in the June 2020 issue of the American Journal of Bioethics,  the well-known lawyer/ethicist Thaddeus  Mason Pope wrote about a current effort “to revise the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) to assure a consistent nationwide approach to consent for brain death testing.” (Emphasis added)

Why just consent to brain death testing?

According to Mr. Pope:

“Right now, a patient might be legally dead in Nevada, New York, or Virginia (where consent is not required). But that same patient might not be legally dead in California, Kansas, or Montana (where consent is required and might be refused). (Emphasis added)”

Instead, Mr. Pope proposes adding this to the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA):

“Reasonable efforts should be made to notify a patient’s legally authorized decision-maker before performing a determination of death by neurologic criteria, but consent is not required to initiate such an evaluation”. (Emphasis added)

Mr. Pope states that typically, the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) follows a four-step process to change a law but notes that the Healthcare Law Committee has already skipped the first three steps and is ready for drafting the new language in the fourth step.

Ironically, there was a case last year in Michigan where the parents of a teenager  pushed for a Bobby’s Law after their son was taken off life support after being declared brain dead despite their objections. The law would “require a minor’s parents to consent to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment or to give do-not-resuscitate orders before medical professionals could end life support for a juvenile” and also allow the parents to defer an apnea test (taking the person off a ventilator to see if the person is able to breathe on his or her own) required to determine brain death. (Emphasis added)

THE WORLD BRAIN DEATH PROJECT

In an August 3, 2020 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) titled “Determination of Brain Death/Death by Neurologic Criteria- The World Brain Death Project” , the authors state that due to “inconsistencies in concept, criteria, practice, and documentation of brain death/death by neurologic criteria (BD/DNC) both internationally and within countries”, there is a need to “formulate a consensus statement of recommendations on determination of BD/DNC”. (Emphasis added)

In a August 3, 2020 Medpage article “Brain Death: What Does It Mean?” on the World Brain Death Project, the writer notes that the “guidelines recommend that consent not be required for apnea testing because of concerns over prolonged somatic support” while quoting a doctor who disagreed:

“Ostensibly, families should be asked to provide consent because the apnea test may lead to cardiovascular collapse in some patients, classifying it as procedure with risk,” (All emphasis added)

MY JOURNEY TO DISCOVER THE FACTS ABOUT BRAIN DEATH

Back in the early 1970s when I was a young intensive care unit nurse, no one questioned the new innovation of brain death organ transplantation. We trusted the experts and the prevailing medical ethic of the utmost respect for every human life.

However, as the doctors diagnosed brain death in our unit and I cared for these patients until their organs were harvested, I started to ask questions. For example, doctors assured us that these patients would die anyway within two weeks even if the ventilator to support breathing was continued, but no studies were cited. I also asked if we were making a brain-injured patient worse by removing the ventilator for up to 10 minutes for the apnea test to see if he or she would breathe since we knew that brain cells start to die when breathing stops for more than a few minutes.

I was told that greater minds than mine had it all figured out so I shouldn’t worry.

It was years before I realized that these doctors did not have the answers themselves and that my questions were valid.

I discovered that some mothers declared “brain dead” were able to gestate their babies for weeks or months to a successful delivery before their ventilators were removed and that there were cases of “brain dead” people like Jahi McMath living for  years after a diagnosis of brain death or even recovering like Zack Dunlap. 

If the legal definition of brain death is truly “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem”, these cases would seem to be impossible.

CONCLUSION

The World Brain Death Project is riddled with potential problems in establishing a worldwide consensus on brain death criteria and testing using a “set of criteria that satisfies the lowest acceptable standard for practice”. (Emphasis added) And changing the US Uniform Determination of Death Act to supersede states requiring consent before brain death testing will not inspire trust in the healthcare system or the law.

Personally, I will not sign an organ donor card or allow my organs to be taken by donation after cardiac death (DCD), a new category of severely brain-injured people who are not brain dead but who are on ventilators (breathing machines) and considered hopeless in terms of survival or predicted “quality of life”. The ventilator is removed and the patient’s heart is expected to stop. (However, a 2016 study showed that 27% of potential donors did not die within the window specified for organ recovery.)

Instead, my family knows that I am willing to donate tissues like corneas, skin, bones, etc. that can be ethically donated after natural death.

It is vitally important that everyone understands all the facts before signing an organ donor card.

And we all should demand transparency and rigorous medical ethics from our healthcare system.

 

 

 

Strongest “Simon’s Law” Yet is Passed in Iowa

nancyvalko brain death, brain injury, futility, medical ethics, ventilators/life support

When baby Simon Crosier was born with Trisomy 18  and a heart defect in 2010, his parents and brothers fell in love with him despite his life-threatening diagnosis and the medical community’s opinion that Trisomy 18 is “incompatible with life”.

However, just days before three month old Simon was scheduled to see a cardiac surgeon, his parents begged for help at the Catholic hospital treating Simon when his condition started to deteriorate. They were shocked when the staff did not intervene. They did not know that the hospital had made their baby a Do Not Resuscitate and that Simon was given only so-called “comfort feeds” due to a secret futility policy. They had to helplessly watch as Simon died in their arms.

Heartbroken and outraged but determined that this would not happen to another child, the Crosiers went to legislator Bill Kidd who formulated Simon’s Law. After five long years of frustration even getting the bill out of committee, Simon’s Law was finally and unanimously passed in the Missouri legislature and signed by Governor Mike Parson last year.

The law prohibits “any health care facility or health care professional from instituting a do-not-resuscitate or similar order without the written or oral consent of at least one parent or legal guardian of a non-emancipated minor patient or resident.”

I testified on Simon’s Law myself because when my own daughter Karen was born in 1982 with Down Syndrome and a heart defect, I was tipped off that my pediatrician had secretly given Karen a Do Not Resuscitate order against my expressed wishes because she felt I “was too emotionally involved with that retarded baby”. I protested and the order was withdrawn.

During the fight for Missouri’s Simon’s Law, other states passed similar laws. Some require only that parents be informed that doctors plan to write a DNR order for a child while others prohibit writing the order over parental objections. Hospital ethics committees are usually involved, especially when such cases go to court. And some states like Texas have problematic laws that give objecting parents 10 days to find a new healthcare facility if they disagree with doctors and ethics committees who decide to take a child off life-sustaining treatment.

However, the strongest type of “Simon’s Law” yet was just signed into law in Iowa on June 29, 2020 by Governor Kim Reynolds.

The law states that:

“A court of law or equity shall not have the authority to require the withdrawal of life-sustaining procedures from a minor child over the objection of the minor child’s parent or guardian, unless there is conclusive medical evidence that the minor child has died and any electronic brain, heart, or respiratory monitoring activity exhibited to the contrary is a false artifact.” (Emphasis added)

This is stunning, especially since it requires conclusive medical evidence that the child has died using the most stringent criteria of no brain, heart or respiratory activity. (As one legislator explained in a video, the “false artifact” provision would prevent a “crooked parent” from keeping the child on life support indefinitely in a felony murder situation.)

In recent years, we have seen court cases like the teenager Jahi McMath who lived for years and even seemed to improve after a diagnosis of brain death and now the case of Baby Tinslee with heart and lung problems whose doctors want to remove her ventilator against the parents’ wishes.

At the very least, this new Iowa law illustrates the necessity of better legal protections for both medically vulnerable children and their parents.