Nearly two decades after suffering a severe brain injury, Terry Wallis was able to speak out. The incident is being dubbed as nothing short of a miracle by doctors who say that his brain, which was badly damaged when his pickup truck went over a cliff, was able to rewire itself.
After the accident, Wallis had sunk into a "minimally conscious state" (MCS) and was unable to utter any word. His recovery has been progressing steadily for about three years now. "This is the only patient who was known to emerge after such a long time from such a state," said Dr. Nicholas Schiff of the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. "This particular story of a man 20 years out recovering and sustaining the recovery and moving on is certainly, to my knowledge, unique and never studied."
Dr Schiff and colleagues have penned a paper in the Journal of Clinical Investigation detailing how Wallis's brain was able to recover. He met Wallis in April 2004, about 8 months after he started to speak. "We saw a man with very severe brain injury with a lot of motor impairment. He had a very inarticulate speech pattern but was fluent in language and had recovered a good deal of what appeared to be his baseline personality," Schiff noted. He added that prior to speaking out Wallis had been able to look at people and follow their actions across the room, but was unable to communicate.
Almost two years after scripting this amazing recovery, Wallis is able to come across as a more alert person and has in fact regained motor function in his lower extremities. Doctors wanted to find out why this happened. Schiff and his colleagues took the help of advanced neuroimaging techniques in order to understand what stood out in Wallis's brain. Comparing the images with healthy subjects and one other patient who has not recovered from MCS, they found that Wallis's brain had regrown some vital nerve connections.
"We think that there was some axon reorganization," said Henning Voss, lead author of the study. "I think that it was just a very, very slow remodeling of the brain, which takes years." Another factor could be the medications that Wallis is taking. He started Paxil two years before he started to speak. "I have become more willing to believe over time that that might have played a role," Schiff said. "I kind of doubt that axonal regrowth is the whole story."
His case and his recovery hold huge importance for other patients in his condition, the researchers concluded.
