Pacemaker For The Brain Shows Promise

Implanted Device Jump-Starts One Man's Seriously Injured Brain Function

(CBS)  Denise Mettie will not give up trying to get a response from her 23-year-old son, Evan, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in Iraq two years ago. On a good day, Evan will blink an eye or move his thumb. Mettie says her once-strapping son is doing better since she brought him to the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey.

"Initially, his prognosis was that he would be in a vegetative state for the rest of his life. He would never swallow on his own. He would never breathe on this own," she says.

Now there's more hope for patients like Evan, who are in what's called a "minimally conscious state" — devastating, but not as severe as a coma or vegetative state. The journal Nature reports today on the first attempt at using deep brain stimulation to arouse a patient with this condition.

A 38-year-old man, brain-damaged after an attack six years ago, had electrodes surgically implanted in his head to try to jump-start his brain function. The results were almost immediate.

"The patient recovered the ability to speak words and identify pictures and complete sentences," says Dr. Nicko Schiff.

The patient is still severely impaired but making progress, according to his mother. To protect her son's privacy, she spoke only by phone today.

"Don't give up," she said. "There is hope. My son can now eat, speak, watch a movie without falling asleep, he can drink from a cup. He can express pain, he can cry and he can laugh."

A similar technique has already been used to help Parkinson's patients. Today's news is based on just one case, so doctors want to test the procedure on other traumatically brain-injured patients to see just how well it works.

Still, it's another reason for Mettie to hope she'll find her son again.

"Because I see in Evan that he is there," she says, "I am not going to take no for an answer, and so I push to get him everything that he deserves."