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 NDEs and patients who did not after successful resuscitation.

The study found that 62 patients, 18 percent, reported having an 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”