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Near Death Experience Still A Medical Mystery

Although medical explanations cannot account for the phenomenon of near-death experience, a minority of cardiac patients diagnosed as clinically dead, report near-death after successful cardiac resuscitation.

"Near-death experience (NDE) occurs with increasing frequency because of improved survival rates resulting from modern techniques of resuscitation," points out Dr Pim van Lommel of the Hospital Rijnstate, Arnhem, The Netherlands.

Most previous NDE research has been retrospective and is therefore of limited value. Dr van Lommel and colleagues aimed to establish the cause of this experience and assess factors that affected its frequency, depth, and content in a study of 344 consecutive cardiac patients who were successfully resuscitated after cardiac arrest in 10 Dutch hospitals.

Dr van Lommel explains: "The content of NDE and the effects on patients seem similar worldwide, across all cultures and times. The subjective nature and absence of a frame of reference for this experience lead to individual, cultural, and religious factors determining the vocabulary used to describe and interpret the experience."

The clinicians add that NDE are reported in many circumstances: cardiac arrest in myocardial infarction (clinical death), shock in postpartum loss of blood or in perioperative complications, septic or anaphylactic shock, electrocution, coma resulting from traumatic brain damage, intracerebral hemorrhage or cerebral infarction, attempted suicide, near-drowning or asphyxia, and apnea. Such experiences are also reported by patients with serious but not immediately life-threatening diseases, in those with serious depression, or without clear cause in fully conscious people.

All of the 344 patients in the study had been diagnosed clinically dead. Clinicians defined NDE as the reported memory of all impressions during a special state of consciousness, including specific elements such as out-of-body experience, pleasant feelings, and seeing a tunnel, a light, deceased relatives, or a life review.

The researchers compared demographic, medical, pharmacological, and psychological data between patients who reported NDE and patients who did not after resuscitation. In addition, the compared the groups two and eight years later to assess any life changes.

They found that 62 patients (18 percent) reported NDE, of whom 41 (12 percent) described a core experience. If a patient has the experience clinicians found it was not associated with duration of cardiac arrest or unconsciousness, medication, or fear of death before cardiac arrest.

NDEs were more common among people under the age of 60, and deeper NDE experiences were more common among women. Substantially more patients who had an NDE-especially a deep experience-died during or shortly after NDE-related hospital stays.

At two-year follow-up, people who had NDE had a significant increase in belief in an afterlife and decrease in fear of death compared with people who had not had NDE. At eight-year follow-up, people who had reported NDE generally did not show any fear of death and strongly believed in an afterlife, in contrast to people who had not reported NDE.

"We do not know why so few cardiac patients report NDE after CPR, although age plays a part," the clinicians conclude. "With a purely physiological explanation such as cerebral anoxia for the experience, most patients who have been clinically dead should report one."

The fact is that NDE pushes at the limits of medical ideas about the range of human consciousness and the mind-brain relation. "Research should be concentrated on the effort to explain scientifically the occurrence and content of NDE."
Lancet 2001; 358: 2039-45.

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