The family asked the doctor not to name the drugs....

Firefighter who started talking after 10 years turns doctor into
MALCOLM RITTER

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Soon after Dr. Jamil Ahmed stood before TV cameras two weeks ago and told how his brain-injured patient had snapped out of a stupor lasting almost 10 years, the phone calls and e-mails started pouring in.

Everybody wants a word with Ahmed, 43, who's just three years removed from his residency training in Boston after earning a medical degree in Pakistan.

There are doctors calling about patients. There are family members of brain-injured people asking if Ahmed can talk to their doctors. And just what drugs was the brain-injured former firefighter, Donald Herbert, taking when he turned from being barely aware and almost mute into a virtual chatterbox for 14 hours with his astounded family and friends?

"Why don't you just tell me the medications?" Ahmed recalls one woman demanding. "You just tell me the name of the medications and I'm not going to be calling you again."

Ahmed, who has been asked by Herbert's family not to identify the drugs, has returned a few phone calls, explaining his medication strategy in general terms and warning, "There is no guarantee."

That's for sure. Ahmed was treading in largely untested waters when he put Herbert on a combination of drugs usually used to treat Parkinson's disease, depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

But, he said, he'd seen such drugs help his other brain-injury patients at the Erie County Medical Center regain focus, memory and powers of concentration, and become less agitated or irritable. He'd even seen such drugs bring people out of comas -- the eyes-closed state of complete unawareness -- and other kinds of impaired consciousness, although not after nearly 10 years like Herbert.

So when he heard Herbert had improved, "I was not surprised," said Ahmed, a rehabilitation specialist. "I was expecting from the beginning he should make a change."

In the days since, the 44-year-old patient has continued to have sporadic conversations and has even played catch with a soccer ball.

Ahmed waves off a question about Terri Schiavo, the brain- damaged Florida woman in a persistent vegetative state who died in March after her feeding tube was removed. He had not examined her and so could say nothing, he said.

But he stressed that family and doctors should not give up on trying to help other brain-damaged patients.

"God will not help you unless you try something," said Ahmed, a Muslim. "If you try something and if you believe, God may help you."

AP

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From another article:

The drug combination, he said, was meant to stimulate neurotransmitters, which brain cells use to communicate with one another.

Dr. Ross Zafonte, chairman of the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Pittsburgh, said such classes of drugs may help with a rerouting of brain circuitry.

While seeming to offer promise in this case, the approach is not a cure-all for brain-injured patients, he said.

"Some of these things happen overnight. . . . Some individuals are non-responders and understanding who is a non-responder is important, too," Zafonte said.

There have been a few other widely publicized examples of brain-damaged patients showing sudden improvement after a number of years, at least temporarily, but experts say they are so rare they don't have much to study.

In 2003, an Arkansas man, Terry Wallis, returned to consciousness 19 years after he was injured in a car accident, stunning his mother by saying "Mom" and then asking for a Pepsi. His brain function has remained limited, his family said months later.

Tennessee police officer Gary Dockery, whose brain was damaged in a 1988 shooting, began speaking to his family one day in 1996, telling jokes and recounting annual winter camping trips. But after 18 hours, he never repeated the unbridled conversation of that day, though he remained more alert than he had been. He died the following year of a blood clot on his lung.

http://health.dailynewscentral.com/content/view/714/0



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