[Brain death: is it an appropriate term?]

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.