Patients who have had major head injuries are sometimes put in a drug-induced
coma to give the brain a chance to heal; a coma reduces the need for blood
flow and may help the swelling go down.
Dr Aziz said doctors typically try every few days to bring someone out of a
coma.
“If you don’t start getting any positive signs, that becomes very worrisome,”
he said, adding that Schumacher’s doctors are probably doing regular brain
scans to look for signs of activity – though such signs may be difficult to
detect if he is still being sedated.
Other experts said it was premature to make an accurate prognosis.
“About 90 percent of the recovery is made within nine to 12 months, so this is
still early days,” said Dr. Anthony Strong, an emeritus chair in
neurosurgery at King’s College London. “The longer someone is in a coma, the
worse their recovery tends to be.”
Now that several weeks have passed since the accident, doctors may also have a
better idea of how the rest of Schumacher’s brain is doing.
“MRI scans can show any secondary deterioration in the brain structure,” said
Dr. Colin Shieff, a neurosurgeon at the National Hospital for Neurology and
Neurosurgery in London and a trustee for Headway, a British brain injury
charity.
He said other parts of Schumacher’s brain that weren’t directly affected by
the accident might now be starting to show worrying signs that may not have
been visible before.
Shieff said that if Schumacher does eventually come out of the coma, he
probably would face significant disabilities because of the length of time
he has already spent comatose.
While there have been rare instances of people emerging from comas months and
years later with the ability to communicate, Shieff was doubtful that would
be the case with Schumacher. He said the cases where comatose people made a
surprising recovery had mostly suffered things like poisoning, strokes or
failed resuscitation attempts.