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Neurotechnological assessment of consciousness disorders: five ethical imperatives

Disorders of consciousness (DOCs) cause great human suffering and material costs for society. Understanding of these disorders has advanced remarkably in recent years, but uncertainty remains with respect to the diagnostic criteria and standards of care. One of the most serious problems concerns mis...

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Autor principal: Evers, Kathinka
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Les Laboratoires Servier 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4969702/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27489455
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author Evers, Kathinka
author_facet Evers, Kathinka
author_sort Evers, Kathinka
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description Disorders of consciousness (DOCs) cause great human suffering and material costs for society. Understanding of these disorders has advanced remarkably in recent years, but uncertainty remains with respect to the diagnostic criteria and standards of care. One of the most serious problems concerns misdiagnoses, their impact on medical decision-making, and on patients' well-being. Recent studies use neurotechnology to assess residual consciousness in DOC patients that traditional behavioral diagnostic criteria are unable to detect. The results show an urgent need to strengthen the development of new diagnostic tools and more refined diagnostic criteria. If residual consciousness may be inferred from robust and reproducible results from neurotechnological communication with DOC patients, this also raises ethical challenges. With reference to the moral notions of beneficence and fundamental rights, five ethical imperatives are here suggested in terms of diagnosis, communication, interpretation of subjective states, adaptation of living conditions, and care.
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spelling pubmed-49697022016-08-03 Neurotechnological assessment of consciousness disorders: five ethical imperatives Evers, Kathinka Dialogues Clin Neurosci Clinical Research Disorders of consciousness (DOCs) cause great human suffering and material costs for society. Understanding of these disorders has advanced remarkably in recent years, but uncertainty remains with respect to the diagnostic criteria and standards of care. One of the most serious problems concerns misdiagnoses, their impact on medical decision-making, and on patients' well-being. Recent studies use neurotechnology to assess residual consciousness in DOC patients that traditional behavioral diagnostic criteria are unable to detect. The results show an urgent need to strengthen the development of new diagnostic tools and more refined diagnostic criteria. If residual consciousness may be inferred from robust and reproducible results from neurotechnological communication with DOC patients, this also raises ethical challenges. With reference to the moral notions of beneficence and fundamental rights, five ethical imperatives are here suggested in terms of diagnosis, communication, interpretation of subjective states, adaptation of living conditions, and care. Les Laboratoires Servier 2016-06 /pmc/articles/PMC4969702/ /pubmed/27489455 Text en Copyright: © 2016 Institut la Conference Hippocrate - Servier Research Group http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Clinical Research
Evers, Kathinka
Neurotechnological assessment of consciousness disorders: five ethical imperatives
title Neurotechnological assessment of consciousness disorders: five ethical imperatives
title_full Neurotechnological assessment of consciousness disorders: five ethical imperatives
title_fullStr Neurotechnological assessment of consciousness disorders: five ethical imperatives
title_full_unstemmed Neurotechnological assessment of consciousness disorders: five ethical imperatives
title_short Neurotechnological assessment of consciousness disorders: five ethical imperatives
title_sort neurotechnological assessment of consciousness disorders: five ethical imperatives
topic Clinical Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4969702/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27489455
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