Is two weeks long enough to determine if someone will recover consciousness? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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If someone has suffered a brain injury and is on life support, determining when to cease that treatment is challenging if they haven’t recovered consciousness, with a new study identifying something called sleep spindles, seen on EEG, as helpful. Johns Hopkins critical care neurologist Susanne Muehlschlegel says there is precedent for waiting more than two weeks.

Muehlschlegel: There's plenty of data from TBI traumatic brain injury from intracerebral hemorrhage that shows if you give people time meaning several weeks maybe even months a large proportion of people will wake up. It's a little bit hard to really make that judgment at two weeks and the whole reason 2 weeks such a marker is that in the ICU we usually try to make a decision about tracheostomy and feeding tube, and the recommendation is to not have someone intubated for longer than two weeks because chronic damage to the trachea can happen.             :32

Muehlschlegel says if this technique helps EEGs are easily done. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.