Disorders of consciousness (DoC) including coma, unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) and the minimally conscious state (MCS) are an important challenge for scientific inquiry. Prestigious international scientific institutions such as the International Brain Injury Association (Zitnay et al, 2006) or the Brain Trauma Foundation, consider that DoC represent, on one side, a difficult challenge in terms of clinical diagnosis and treatment, but also a promising opportunity for generating fundamental scientific advances about the nature of consciousness, which can help to increase our knowledge about the singularity of the human brain (Laureys et al, 2012). The current State of the Art (Giacino et al, 2014; Wade, 2014) on this topic, clearly determines three main challenges for future advances on clinical care and research in this population:
-Diagnosis: Lack of current standards to guide the timing or nature of clinical assessment in this population.
-Prognosis: Scarce literature and/or data focused on prognostic clinical factors and biomarkers for outcome prediction
-Treatment: Insufficient data to recommend for or against the use of any particular treatment intervention including the need of further research regarding new promising therapeutic approaches (e.g: non-invasive brain stimulation).
Thus, the overall goal of DOCMA is to create a structured international network of institutions involved in the care of individuals with DoC, where specific objectives are:
-Consolidating of a joint international scientific and innovation programme for developing a research project focused on diagnosis, assessment, and management of Doc patients.
-Establishing a standardized methodology, and data sharing resources to enable data access and research collaborations concerning DoC.
-Contribution to transfer knowledge and quality of life of the individuals, by generating new services, technologies and/or products to respond to the society needs concerning DoC.
Finally, DoC have profound social, ethical, and economic consequences. All these clinical entities are associated with an overwhelmed functional dependency requiring prolonged assistance resources. The knowledge acquired and the techniques developed can help to improve the quality of life for persons with Doc and their relatives or informal caregivers by including more efficient diagnosis and assessment processes, better care-pathways and new cost-effective treatments.
