What Happens To Your Brain Before You Die?

One of humanity’s greatest mysteries is what happens to the brain before you die. Scientists all over the world have therefore sought the answer to this question. However, no one has yet managed to come up with a clear answer.

In 2018, scientists at Charité Berlin, a teaching hospital in Germany, and Ohio University in the United States also tried to answer this age-old question. Their goal was to discover what happens to the brain when its energy is depleted and they run out of blood.

To do that, they used electrodes to decipher the brain activity of patients who had suffered severe brain injuries. In particular, this information helped shed light on the consequences of stroke. In addition, it also provided a fundamental insight into the neurobiology of death.

The neurobiology of death

The brain is the organ in the body most susceptible to hypoxia and ischemia. Hypoxia is when an organ does not get enough oxygen in the blood. On the other hand, ischemia is the interruption or drop in blood circulation in a specific zone. Oxygen deficiency causes damage to the cells.

These are the cells most susceptible to hypoxia and ischemia:

• The pyramidal nerve cells of the neocortex in layers II, IV and V.
• The CA1 pyramidal nerve cells of the hippocampus.
• The nerve cells of the striatum.
• Purkinje’s cells.

An interruption of blood circulation to the brain also causes irreversible damage to these cells in less than ten minutes. This can happen, for example, after a cardiac arrest.

What happens to the brain before you die?

Until Jens Dreier’s study, scientists could only base their hypotheses on information from EEGs (electroencephalograms). So this is what they were able to determine:

• Brain death occurs when the EEG stops.
• The nerve cells in the cerebral cortex can remain polarized for several minutes during the “electrical silence”.

The experiment

During this study, the researchers analyzed what happened to the patients’ physiopathology. They did this for sudden hypoxia or ischemia that occurred the moment they removed the patient’s life support system.

In addition, in the intensive care unit, the patients participating in the study were kept under neurological supervision with intracranial electrodes. These people had suffered from one of the following conditions:

• a subarachnoid hemorrhage,
• a malignant infarction in the cerebral hemisphere,
• or a traumatic brain injury.

The scientists performed the neurological monitoring during the patients’ deaths. All patients enrolled in the study had a no CPR statement.

Conclusion: the state of the brain before you die

The experiment showed that in patients with severe brain injuries, the long periods of electrical silence in the cerebral cortex are often caused by prolonged neuronal depolarization.

An extended depolarization is an almost complete wave of depolarization of the neuronal cells and the glial cells. It has also been linked to vasoconstriction and vasodilation.

Prolonged depolarization can occur in the following cases. Bee:

• Eye migraines.
• Subarachnoidal haemorrhage.
• Intracebral hemorrhage.
• A skull trauma.
• An ischemic stroke.

This causes a spreading pattern where the prolonged depolarization can penetrate the tissue. It seems that this depolarization is only apparent through neurological monitoring using neurological imaging.

Researchers were thus able to draw a conclusion. The human brain responds with a concrete pathological pattern to severe brain ischemia. Certain types of nerve cells try to prevent the brain from dying by creating an electrical imbalance.

When the brain stops receiving oxygenated blood, the nerve cells try to collect the resources they have left. At that point, a low pressure of non-dispersion occurs. This is then followed by the spreading depolarization. This is also known as a “brain sunami.”

So what happens to the brain before you die? In summary, the spreading depolarization marks the beginning of the toxic changes in the cells that then lead to death.

However, depolarization alone is not a signal of certain death because it can be reversed. Much remains to be done on this subject. That is why further studies are needed.