Research about restored brain function by using sleeping pills

It has been all over the popular news: a Dutch man who has not been able to move or talk for eight years due to severe brain injury can once again function normally with the use of sleeping pills. Neurobiologists Conrado Bosman and Cyriel Pennartz of the UvA's Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences are among the scientists behind a study that tries to unravel the working mechanism of this phenomenon. Their results are published in the journal Cortex. The fact that a certain subset of patients with brain injury can benefit from the drug zolpidem, a GABA receptor agonist, is in itself not new. What is new is that the researchers in this study, led by the Amsterdam UMC, have found clues for the thus far unknown working mechanism behind this phenomenon. This could potentially help to find a more long-term solution for these patients. At the moment, using the sleeping drug only restores these patient's brain functions for a short period of time.