Will Schiavos post-mortem reveal anything ?
Jamie Talan Pinellas Park, April 1 Autopsies are performed to tell stories, and there are two chapters of Terri Schiavos life that doctors, lawyers, family members and now a public debating end-of-life care would like to hear. The first is why a 25-year-old woman suffered a heart attack that left her in an unresponsive state since 1990. The second is whether her brain shows characteristic signs of a persistent vegetative state. An autopsy may not shed much light on the first question, experts say. Though it can reveal whether there are signs of physical trauma, the autopsy will not tell you what caused the cardiac arrest in 1990, said Dr Cyril H. Hecht, a forensic pathologist and coroner of Allegany County in Pennsylvania. To support the case that Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state, the autopsy would be expected to find little islands of lost tissue in the cortex, the thinking centre of the brain, said Dr Fred Plum, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan w
