PHILADELPHIA – Six years after he was mugged while walking home one night – beaten and kicked and left for dead, with his skull partway caved in – a man regained the ability to talk, chew and swallow after slender electrodes were implanted deep in his brain.

The patient, whose unprecedented recovery took place at a rehabilitation hospital in central New Jersey, had been in a “minimally conscious state,” and his parents had all but given up hope. For years, he had kept his eyes closed most of the time, sometimes responding to questions with slight finger movements or an occasional faint shake of the head. He was fed through a tube.

Now 38, he is alert and can brush his hair and bring a cup to his mouth to drink. Recently, he recited the first 16 words of the pledge of allegiance.

“He can cry and he can laugh,” his mother said tearfully Wednesday, joining in a teleconference with her son’s doctors. “He can say “I love you, mommy.”‘

The doctors cautioned that their results, reported in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, would not apply to patients like Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman whose life became a sociopolitical flashpoint.

She was in a persistent vegetative state, whereas the male patient – whose identity is not being made public – was clinging to consciousness and had large regions of his brain intact. Indeed, Schiavo was the recipient of a similar implant and it had no effect.

But the operation described in the new study – the first such implant in a minimally conscious patient – could offer hope for the families of untold thousands who have similar brain injuries.

The patient’s mother expressed hope that her son’s success might translate to some wounded soldiers returning from Iraq. Traumatic brain injury has been called the signature injury of the war, as soldiers who might once have bled to death are surviving due to body armor and other advances.

The researchers warned that their study has involved just one patient to date, though 11 more will receive the implant under a special approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The candidates are being carefully selected from the “upper end” of patients who are minimally conscious, and the procedure likely would not work for many on the lower end, said neuroscientist Nicholas D. Schiff, the study’s lead author.

Still, the results are encouraging, said Ashwini Sharan, a neurosurgeon at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia who was not involved with the study. Doctors have long told families there is no effective treatment for brain injuries, he said.

“We have to go think about all these people we forgot,” Sharan said.

“We said that nothing could be done for them.”

Though they are still a thing of the future for those with brain injuries, 40,000 such devices already have been successfully implanted in people with various illnesses.

Most have Parkinson’s. Scientists do not know exactly why the process works, but the electrodes transmit a current that seems to block the abnormal signals that cause a patient to have tremors. The electrodes are inserted into a region of the brain called the subthalamic nucleus; the brain-injury patient has electrodes permanently implanted in a region located just above, a walnut-sized area called the thalamus.

In both cases, the current is delivered from pacemaker-like devices that are implanted in the chest.

Such devices also are undergoing clinical trials in patients with mental illness, including severe forms of depression and anxiety. And Sharan has participated in a trial of the device for patients with epilepsy.

The latest surgery was performed at the Cleveland Clinic. The followup testing and rehab were done at the JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, N.J. The research to decide which part of the brain to target was done at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.

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(c) 2007, The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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AP-NY-08-01-07 1442EDT