How long should someone remain on life support? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Deciding when to stop life sustaining treatment for someone who’s unconscious after brain injury may be easier now that a new study identifies sleep spindles, which can be seen on electroencephalograms, or EEGs, along with other testing, to predict who may recover. Susanne Muehlschlegel, a critical care neurologist at Johns Hopkins, says this happens fairly often.

Muehlschlegel: It probably happens more often than we think. It gets into the notion of let's give people more time before we make this crucial decision about stopping machines, what we call withdrawal of life sustaining therapies, and so this really gives everybody pause to think well maybe we need to give people more time and not do the withdrawal in the first week or even 2 weeks. The guidelines right now recommend that because we don't have great long term studies to say how long should you wait.      :32

Muehlschlegel says further study will be needed to validate this approach but she’s hopeful the new technique may prove helpful. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.