Brain death is the irreversible end of all brain activity (including involuntary activity necessary to sustain life) due to total necrosis of the cerebral neurons following loss of brain oxygenation. It should not be confused with a persistent vegetative state. Patients classified as brain dead can have their organs surgically removed for organ donation.
Brain death, either of the whole brain or the brain stem, is used as a legal indicator of death in many jurisdictions.
Read more about Brain Death: Legal History, Medical Criteria, Consciousness, Organ Donation
Other articles related to "brain death, death, brain":
... In the years since the designation of brain death as a new criterion for death, attention has been directed towards the central role of the nervous system in a number of areas of ethical decision-making ... This latter quest has led to the concept of brain birth (or brain life), signifying the converse of brain death ... the perceived symmetry between processes at the beginning and end of life, thus if brain function is a criterion used to determine the medical death of a person, it should ...
... when the central nervous system of fetus is neurobiologically "mature" "brain birth" concepts (compare with brain death) at the first appearance of brain waves in ...
... Brain death may result in legal death, but still with the heart beating, and with mechanical ventilation all other vital organs may be kept completely alive and functional ... Most organ donation for organ transplantation is done in the setting of brain death ... If a brain-dead individual is not an organ donor, ventilator and drug support is discontinued and cardiac death is allowed to occur ...
... One of the scenarios in which legal death is usually pronounced is when a person is considered brain dead ... Brain death is considered an irreversible coma ... A patient is diagnosed as brain dead when there is no detectable brain activity ...
... Brain death may result in legal death, but still with the heart beating, and with mechanical ventilation all other vital organs may be kept completely alive and functional, providing optimal opportunities ... Most organ donation for organ transplantation is done in the setting of brain death ... and prospective donors may designate either brain death or cardiac death – see organ transplantation in Japan ...
Famous quotes containing the words death and/or brain:
“When Death to either shall come—
I pray it be first to me.”
—Robert Bridges (1844–1930)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)