SYNOPSISThe level of coma can be measured by the assessment of changes of behaviour after different intensities of stimulation. Two additive scales (Guttman scales) for susceptibility to stimulation and reactivity were developed, constituting the Munich Coma Scale (MCS). The findings of previous investigations were repeated in a new sample of 67 comatose patients. Implications of the additivity of reactivity are discussed and related to the concept of 'behavioural arousal' advanced in the recent literature.The states of severe disturbances ofconsciousness are often referred to as 'coma', although, strictly speaking, the word 'coma' refers to a state of complete loss of consciousness from which a patient cannot be aroused even by powerful stimulation.2 Nevertheless, 'coma' has been widely used to indicate different gradations of disturbances of consciousness. In this article 'coma' is used in this rather general sense.Among the different approaches towards a classification of coma (Regan and BrowneMayers, 1956;Fischgold and Mathis, 1959;Jouvet, 1965;Marrubini, 1965;Paillas et al., 1965;Bauer, 1966;Gulbrandsen et al., 1972;Demedts and Pillen, 1973;Teasdale and Jennett, 1974) two types of classification may be distinguished. One approach is based on systematic neurological examination with the purpose of correlating neurological symptoms and the implicit morphological substrate with loss of consciousness (Fisher, 1969;Plum and Posner, 1972). The other approach is based on the fact that the loss ofconsciousness, the most important feature common to all comatose patients, is correlated with the behavioural aspects of the patients (Gulbrandsen et al., 1972;. In this instance, the depth of un- responsiveness is determined by the assessment of behavioural responses to stimuli of different intensity. Both types of classification were combined into a single scheme by Jouvet (1965). The following study is based on the latter approach to classification of comatose states. In a previous study four non-verbal, physical stimuli were selected out of an initial set of 10 stimuli, as these cover the whole spectrum of comatose patients quite satisfactorily and form an additive (Guttman) scale (v. Cramon et al., 1975). A catalogue of some 59 stimulus-bound changes of behaviour at the outset of our experiments could be summarized into four types of reactions, which also form an additive scale.It is the aim of this paper to repeat our experiments with a new sample, the hypothesis being that the reduced set of stimuli and the condensed form of subsequent reactions will give the same results as in the previous study. It is also hypothesized that the additive structure of the two scales is maintained.
METHODSSUBJECTS Sixty seven patients with clinically presumed or diagnosed disturbance of attention were examined. Forty six of these were suffering from neurological diseases; 21 were intoxicated from self-poisoning in the course of suicide attempts.