Iriarte J, Palma J A, Kufoy E, Miguel M J de
Servicio de Neurofisiología,Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, España.
Neurologia. 2012 Jan;27(1):16-21. doi: 10.1016/j.nrl.2010.06.004. Epub 2010 Nov 18.
Brain death is generally accepted as a concept to indicate death. It was introduced about 40 years ago, and it was considered the ideal situation for donation of organs.
During this time, however, there have been problems in the understanding of this concept both in the medical profession and in the general population. University students from medical and non-medical schools were tested for their understanding of this concept.
Our results show that less than one third of the non-medical students identified brain death as death. The data from the medical students changed as they progressed through their studies, but only 2/3 of the graduating medical class believed that brain death is death.
Similar results have been seen in other universities around the world, and a renewed effort on the re-education of the concept of brain death may be worthwhile. Although we cannot extrapolate these results to the general population, the confusion is probably similar; hence an effort should be made to solve this problem.
脑死亡作为表明死亡的概念已被广泛接受。它大约在40年前被提出，并且被认为是器官捐献的理想情形。
然而在此期间，无论是在医学专业领域还是普通大众中，对这一概念的理解都存在问题。对来自医学院和非医学院的大学生进行了关于他们对这一概念理解的测试。
我们的结果显示，不到三分之一的非医学专业学生将脑死亡认定为死亡。医学生的数据随着他们学业的推进而变化，但只有三分之二的医学毕业班学生认为脑死亡即死亡。
世界其他大学也出现了类似的结果，重新开展关于脑死亡概念的再教育工作或许是值得的。尽管我们不能将这些结果推广至普通大众，但困惑可能是相似的；因此应该努力解决这一问题。
