The first sense people lose when they're close to dying, according to doctors
22.04.2023 - 09:59
/ dailyrecord.co.uk
Doctors have shared the important sign that someone is close to death - and it involves one of their senses being lost.
What happens around the time of death is a hard topic to gain knowledge about, especially surrounding how the person is feeling and the kind of things that they experience.
This is because the patient is often too weak or drowsy to explain how they feel, and instead doctors have to rely on the accounts of those who are in the room with them, such as family and friends.
The Mirror reports that historically, death was something that happened very quickly - before modern medicines allowed dying patients to live longer.
For most people who die in this way, there's a sudden change that takes place around the last few days of life - known as "active dying".
James Hallenbeck, a palliative-care specialist at Stanford University, said people tend to lose their senses and desires in a certain order.
Writing in Palliative Care Perspectives, his guide to palliative care for physicians, he said: “First hunger and then thirst are lost. Speech is lost next, followed by vision.
"The last senses to go are usually hearing and touch.”
Many people also believe that there's a bright light that's often seen right before a patient passes away.
David Hovda, the director of the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center, said the brain "starts to sacrifice areas which are less critical to survival", reports The Atlantic.
“As the brain begins to change and start to die, different parts become excited, and one of the parts that becomes excited is the visual system - and so that’s where people begin to see light," he said.
These heightened senses seem to support what experts know about how the brain responds to death.
Jimo Borjigin, a