Hope Raised for Treating Comas

A comatose person dying of liver failure produces large quantities of tranquilizers, a finding that offers some hope for treating such hepatic comas, scientists said last week. Anthony S. Basile said at a London meeting that he and his colleagues at the National Institutes of Health’s Laboratory of Neuroscience in Bethesda, Md., have found five times the normal amount of benzodiazepine--commercially sold as Valium--in the brains of those who have died of liver failure.

“This is the first evidence that benzodiazepines found naturally in the brain play a role in illness,” said Phil Skolnick, chief of the neuroscience lab. “This study provides a rational basis for a cause and a cure for hepatic comas,” for which there is currently no good therapy.

About 30,000 people in the United States annually die of liver failure. Researchers believe that hepatic coma is caused by toxic substances that accumulate in the body and make their way to the brain after the liver fails.