Forty-five states have affirmed "death by whole brain criteria" as legal death through legislation (California's is Health and Safety Code Section 7180) and the remaining states have done so by judicial doctrine.
So patients who fulfill cardiac criteria for death usually fulfill brain criteria soon afterwards.
For example, improved efficiency of obtaining consent, or the adoption of higher brain criteria for brain death may be politically easier to achieve.
Then a patient who satisfied whole-brain criteria would count as alive.
As we have seen, however, modern life-supports permitted cardiopulmonary function without brain function, setting up a competition between traditional and whole-brain criteria for determining death.
The champion of whole-brain criteria may retort that such a body is not really breathing and circulating blood; the respirator is doing the work.
Certainly, any proponent of DCD will see the current law's (disjunctive) acceptance of cardiopulmonary criteria for death as offering a major practical advantage over any policy that accepted only whole-brain criteria.
Moreover, acceptance of whole-brain criteria for death facilitates organ transplantation by permitting a declaration of death and retrieval of still-viable organs while respiration and circulation continue, with mechanical assistance, in a "brain-dead" body.
Many of our integrative functions, according to the challenge, are not mediated by the brain and can therefore persist in individuals who meet whole-brain criteria for death by standard clinical tests.
Some traditional defenders of the cardiopulmonary approach believe that the insufficiency of whole-brain criteria for death is evident not only in exceptional cases, such as those described earlier, but in all cases in which patients with total brain failure exhibit respirator-assisted cardiopulmonary function.
The most commonly used brain injury criterion in the automotive industry is the Head Injury Criterion, a scalar function of the translational acceleration pulse of the head (NHTSA 1972), which is used for safety assessments based on the interpretation of crash tests and virtual experiments.
