From as far back as medical records have been kept, it has been known that patients with severe head injuries or massive intracranial hemorrhage often die as a result of apnea: breathing stops before the heart does. In such cases, the pressure in the main (supratentorial) compartment of the skull becomes so great that brain tissue herniates through the tentorial opening, a bony and fibrous ring in the membrane that separates the spaces containing the cerebral hemispheres and the cerebellum. The brain stem runs through this opening, and a pressure cone formed by the herniated brain tissue may dislocate the brain stem downward and cause irreversible damage by squeezing it from each side. An early manifestation of such an event is a disturbance of consciousness; a late feature is permanent apnea. This was previously nature’s way out.

With the widespread development of intensive care facilities in the 1950s and ’60s, more and more such moribund patients were rushed to specialized units and put on ventilators just before spontaneous breathing ceased. In some cases the effect was dramatic. When a blood clot could be evacuated, the primary brain damage and the pressure cone it had caused might prove reversible. Spontaneous breathing would return. In many cases, however, the massive, structural intracranial pathology was irremediable. The ventilator, which had taken over the functions of the paralyzed respiratory centre, enabled oxygenated blood to be delivered to the heart, which went on beating. Physicians were caught up in a therapeutic dilemma partly of their own making: the heart was pumping blood to a dead brain. Sometimes the intracranial pressure was so high that the blood could not even enter the head. Modern technology was exacting a very high price: the beating-heart cadaver.

Brain-stem death may also arise as an intracranial consequence of extracranial events. The main cause in such cases is circulatory arrest. The usual context is delayed or inadequate cardiopulmonary resuscitation following a heart attack. The intracranial repercussions depend on the duration and severity of impaired blood flow to the head. In the 1930s the British physiologist John Scott Haldane had emphasized that oxygen deprivation “not only stopped the machine, but wrecked the machinery.” Circulatory arrest lasting two or three minutes can cause widespread and irreversible damage to the cerebral hemispheres while sparing the brain stem, which is more resistant to anoxia. Such patients remain in a “persistent vegetative state.” They breathe and swallow spontaneously, grimace in response to pain, and are clinically and electrophysiologically awake, but they show no behavioral evidence of awareness. Their eyes are episodically open (so that the term coma is inappropriate to describe them), but their retained capacity for consciousness is not endowed with any content. Some patients have remained like this for many years. Such patients are not dead, and their prognosis depends in large part on the quality of the care they receive. The discussion of their management occasionally abuts onto controversies about euthanasia and the “right to die.” These issues are quite different from that of the “determination of death,” and failure to distinguish these matters has been the source of great confusion.

If circulatory arrest lasts for more than a few minutes, thebrain stem—including its respiratory centre—will be as severely damaged as the cerebral hemispheres. Both the capacity for consciousness and the capacity to breathe will be irreversibly lost. The individual will then show all the clinical features of a dead brain, even if the heart can be restarted.

Evolution of the concept of brain-stem death

It was against this sort of background that French neurologists, in 1958, described a condition they called coma dépassé (literally, “a state beyond coma”). Their patients all had primary, irremediable, structural brain lesions; were deeply comatose; and were incapable of spontaneous breathing. They had not only lost their ability to react to the external world, but they also could no longer control their own internal environment. They became poikilothermic (i.e., they could not control their body temperature, which varied with that of the environment). They could not control their blood pressure or vary their heart rate in response to appropriate stimuli. They could not even retain body water and would pass great volumes of urine. The organism as a whole had clearly ceased to function. Coma dépassé was considered a “frontier state” between life and death. Ventilation was continued in the vast majority of such cases until the heartbeat ceased, usually a few days later.

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Where Does the Concept of a “Grim Reaper” Come From?

In 1968 the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School published a report entitled “A Definition of Irreversible Coma” in The Journal of the American Medical Association. This watershed article listed criteria for the recognition of the “brain-death syndrome.” It stated that the persistence of a state of apneic coma with no evidence of brain-stem and spinal reflexes and a flat electroencephalogram over a period of 24 hours implied brain death, provided the cause of the coma was known and provided reversible causes of brain dysfunction (such as hypothermia or drug intoxication) had been excluded. The report explicitly identified brain death with death (without seeking to define death) and endorsed the withdrawal of respiratory support in such cases. No evidence was published to legitimize the contention that the coma was irreversible; i.e., that if artificial ventilation was continued no such patient ever recovered consciousness, and that all invariably developed asystole. There was wide medical experience among the members of the committee, however, and its contentions have since been massively validated. Not a single exception has come to light.

The next few years witnessed increasing sophistication in the techniques used to diagnose brain death, none of which, however, surpassed basic clinical assessment. In 1973 two neurosurgeons in Minneapolis, Minn., identified the death of the brain stem as the point of no return in the diagnosis of brain death. In 1976 and 1979, the Conference of Royal Colleges and Faculties of the United Kingdom published important memoranda on the subject. The first described the clinical features of a dead brain stem, the second identified brain-stem death with death. In 1981 in the United States, the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research published a report (“Defining Death”) and a list of guidelines very similar to the British ones. The commission also proposed a model statute, called the Uniform Determination of Death Act, which was subsequently endorsed by the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, and the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws and became law in many states. International opinion and practice has moved along similar lines in accepting the concept of brain-stem death.