Doctors Claim Suspended Animation Success

Philoneist.com writes to tell us the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that US doctors have developed a process to induce hypothermia in trauma patients, shutting down their bodily functions for up to three hours. The process has been proven about 90% effective in trials with pigs and now the doctors would like the go ahead to test it on humans who would "probably die" under normal care.

Comments

Not quite suspended

[BWJones]

Well, it is not quite suspended animation as the subjects have been cooled to about 10C (50F), so some biological processes do indeed still occur. However, it is below the temperature for most coherent biological processes to continue to function. Furthermore, it has been known for some time that with certain traumas involving CNS or CNS function, cooling has been an effective means of controlling continued damage related to the CNS. For instance, in many CNS traumas such as stroke (ischemic or haemorrhagic), there are cascade reactions that follow the initial insult. These cascades involve Ca+2 mediated events that often result in or are the result of cellular apoptotic pathways being induced which causes further damage. Cooling of the body in a trauma unit tends to limit such damage for reasons that are not completely understood at the basic science level and the free radicals discussed in the article are not the only possibility for damage as there are many protein pumps whose physiology is dramatically altered by temperature and pH changes.

It's too bad that the NIH budget was cut this year (effectively below the rate of inflation) by the Whitehouse and further cut by Congress who, while managing to take care of their own salaries before going on vacation, could not work in the NIH budget to their schedule. As a result, many labs here in the US this year have had to slash this years budget by 12-20% which has a dramatic effect on the success of bioscience research such as this suspended animation work.

Drowning people in icy waters...

[IAAP]

I'm trying to remember where I've seen this, but IIRC, this has been done by accident when someone falls into icy waters. I think it was a kid who fell into an incy pond and was eventually rescued. Because of the temperature, he was fine. Appearently, it slowed his metabolism down enough that it didn't deplete all of the O2 in hsi blood.

I'm sifting through all of the Google hits from my search terms now.

Interesting

[lxs]

This is interesting, but not quite new. I remember hearing about Soviet surgeons cooling down and effectively shutting down patients' bodies to perform open heart surgery without having to use a heart lung machine. (which were very hard to come by in the Soviet Union)

Re:90% effectiveness... what about the remaining 1

[blincoln]

Should we suppose that the remaining 10% died a horrible, cold death?

Even assuming the article weren't talking about terminal patients, death from hypothermia is one of the least horrible ways to go. Your higher brain functions stop working, you become very calm and stop feeling cold, and then you go to sleep.