Pitt, UPMC experts want people suffering cardiac arrest to chill
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Each year about 150,000 Americans die from trauma, chiefly from automobile accidents or gunshot wounds. About 25 percent of these deaths are from cardiac arrest, usually induced by massive bleeding from the injury.
Cardiac arrest is cessation of normal blood circulation because the heart muscle doesn't contract effectively. It is different from, but may be caused by, a heart attack, which occurs when blood flow to the heart is impaired.
Fewer than 10 percent of trauma victims who suffer cardiac arrest survive. But experts at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC believe they can improve significantly the odds for those who reach the hospital alive by chilling them to nearly 50 degrees below the normal body temperature of 98.6.
Supercooling the body slows metabolic processes, and can buy physicians the time they need to stop bleeding from an injury before so much blood is lost that it triggers cardiac arrest, said Samuel Tisherman, professor of critical care medicine and surgery at the Pitt School of Medicine and associate director of the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at Pitt.
A team headed by Dr. Tisherman has received financing from the U.S. Department of Defense to study how much therapeutic hypothermia (body cooling) can improve survival in such trauma victims.
In a 2002 Australian study of patients who suffered cardiac arrest from causes other than trauma, 49 percent of those whose bodies were cooled by 10 degrees Fahrenheit -- to about 88 degrees -- lived, compared with just 26 percent in the control group.
Mild hypothermia is enough to slow damage to the brain and other organs from loss of oxygen. Because their cardiac arrest was not induced by blood loss, non-trauma patients don't need to be cooled as much.
First Published November 15, 2011 12:00 am
