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TUESDAY, March 13 (HealthDay News) -- A dose of the prescription sleep aid Ambien had the opposite effect on one French woman, awakening her from a two-year coma.
The 48-year-old woman suffered from akinetic mutism -- a sort of persistent coma in which the patient is alert but can neither speak nor move. She had lain in this state after sustaining damage to the frontal lobe of her brain due to a lack of oxygen caused by an attempted suicide by hanging.
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But one day she was given zolpidem (Ambien) to treat ongoing insomnia.
"Twenty minutes later, her family noticed surprising signs of enhanced arousal," the study authors wrote. "She became able to communicate to her family, to eat without (swallowing) troubles, and to move alone in her bed. These effects started 20 minutes after drug administration and lasted for two to three hours."
After treatment, the patient could walk for short periods, and to speak if prompted, though not spontaneously. "This phenomenon was so reproducible that caregivers used to give her up to three tablets each day without sleepiness as 'side effect,' " the researchers wrote.
Using positron emission tomography (PET) scans, the researchers found that the drug treatment caused the woman's frontal lobes to become "way more active," noted Dr. James Grisolia, a neurologist at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego. He was not involved in the research, which was led by Dr. Christine Brefel-Courbon, of the University Hospital in Toulouse, France.
Speaking of the case, Grisolia said that, "It is a function of drugs like this that, besides putting you to sleep, they can also increase blood flow. And that activity apparently trumped the sleepiness caused by the medication in this one patient," he explained.
The results are published in the March issue of Annals of Neurology.
"This is a clinical mini-miracle that may give more insight into how the brain works," Grisolia added. "In the long run, it might help us to help other people that are in unresponsive or semi-coma states."
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