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A 38-year-old severely brain-injured man, who was virtually unconscious for six years, can now chew food, drink out of a cup and recite 16 words of the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance after surgeons used deep-brain electrical stimulation — giving researchers hope that this form of therapy could usher a new era for treating patients in a minimally-conscious state.

Deep-brain stimulation, essentially a pacemaker for the brain, has been used in the treatment of Parkinson's disease and depression. The use of electrodes in cases of severe brain damage, reported in Thursday's issue of the science journal Nature, marks a new chapter in the treatment of brain disorders and gives hope to thousands of families.

Researchers, however, cautioned that the approach must be tested in more people, and its effects may not be shared equally by all patients in a minimally-conscious state.

"At present, we have no existing treatment for brain injury that's proven to either accelerate the pace of recovery from brain injury or improve functional outcome at the end of the day," Joseph Giacino, one of the researchers and a neurophysiologist at the JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute, said Wednesday.

"What our team has demonstrated that it is indeed possible to alter the course of recovery from severe brain injury even this late in the process.

"It's going to have force skeptics to revisit the view that severe brain injury is an immutable condition."

The man, whose name was not released, was assaulted in 1999 in an incident that left him bed-ridden and under 24-hour nursing care. He is being treated at a rehabilitation facility in the New York-New Jersey area.

Before the electrodes were implanted, the patient was in a so-called minimally-conscious state.

Unlike a person in a coma or persistent vegetative state, he showed occasional signs of awareness and infrequently tried to communicate using signals or mouthing words.

Those glimpses of consciousness were fleeting and not sustained, but such activity points to the existence of a still-functioning brain network, and researchers believed the patient would benefit from some kind of intervention that would partially restore brain activity.

They used computer-generated maps, image-guided navigation and 3-D mapping of the brain to manoeuvre the electrodes in place with millimetre precision and connect them to programmable pacemaker batteries, implanted in the chest.

Instead of the wires going to the heart, as they do with cardiac patients, they are connected to the brain.

The electrodes were used to jump-start an area known as the thalamus, on both sides of the brain, which has been suggested to have a role in arousal and attentiveness.

Immediately, the researchers noticed that the patient started opening his eyes and moving his head to follow people around the room. He now chews and swallows, which allows him to be spoon-fed, rather than relying on a feeding tube.

Aside from reciting a portion of the Pledge of Allegiance, he also responds verbally with one to three words.

He has recovered some limb movement and is now able to brush his hair and raise the toothbrush to his mouth. He can't actually carry out the latter task because the tendons in his arms contracted after years of immobility.

The clinical trial period lasted more than a year and ended in February of last year. The patient still receives deep-brain stimulation treatment.

Choking back tears as she spoke to reporters in a conference call Wednesday, the mother of the patient thanked doctors for bringing back her oldest of three sons, who loved music, shopping and comic books.

She recalled the surgeon telling her that her son would "be a vegetable for the rest of his life" after he was robbed, beaten, kicked in the head and left for dead as he was walking home one day.

Thanks to deep-brain stimulation, he can now watch a movie without falling asleep, express pain, cry and laugh.

"The most important part," she said, "is he can say 'Mommy' and 'Pop.' He can say 'I love you mommy'."

Ali Rezai, co-author of the study and director of the Center for Neurological Restoration at the Cleveland Clinic, said most patients in this state are forgotten about by everyone except for their families. They are cared for in long-term nursing facilities, without the benefit of rehabilitation or treatment.

There are no firm statistics on how many people are in this minimally-conscious state, but one estimate suggests that there are up 280,000 in the U.S.

"With continuing research, I'm hopeful that we can help a lot of people and to reconnect them with their loved ones," Dr. Rezai said.