Near-Death Experiences can be predicted scientifically
in almost 20 percent of people who suffer cardiac arrest and are successfully
resuscitated, says near death researcher Rene Jorgensen.
The results of the first major prospective study of
near-death experiences, conducted over a 13-year-long period and set up in ten
different hospitals in the Netherlands, was published in the international
medical journal The Lancet, vol. 358, issue 9298.
This scientific study included 344 cardiac patients who were
successfully resuscitated after suffering cardiac arrest and compared demographic,
pharmacological, and psychological data between patients who reported Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and
patients who did not after successful resuscitation.
The study found that 62 patients, 18 percent, reported
having an Near Death Experience (NDE) with 41 patients, 12 percent, describing a core NDE. The study
also compared life changes between the NDE group and the control group after 2
and 8 years.
NDE research is normally done retrospective, but in this
study patients were interviewed shortly after resuscitation and its prospective
nature is evidence to support that NDEs are not invented stories long after the
experience. Also the theory that the NDE is a hallucination caused by the loss
of oxygen to the brain (“anoxia”) is put in doubt by the study because the
patients were unconscious during clinical death.
“All patients had a cardiac arrest, and were
clinically dead with unconsciousness resulting from insufficient blood supply
to the brain. In those circumstances, the EEG (a measure of brain
electrical activity) becomes flat,” explains cardiologist Pim van Lommel, MD.
“Our results show that medical factors cannot account for the occurrence of
NDE”
