Doctors in New Orleans have deliberately chilled a heart attack victim to the bone in a pioneering new medical procedure which aims to prevent brain damage.
When Cynthia Crawford suffered a heart attack, instead of rushing her to the intensive care, her doctors placed her in a inflatable cocoon like pool and sprayed her body with icy cold jets of water, pushing her into hypothermia.
“Like jumping in the North Sea,” said, Dr. Paul McMullan, the cardiologist treating her.
Days later, she recovered without the brain damage she would otherwise have suffered.
Heart attack affects millions of people around the world every year. During a heart attack, the blood flow to the various parts of the body is affected and can produce permanent damage. The medical team at the Ochsner Clinic tired out a radical new procedure which helps limit the extend of damage. The damage does not occur instentaneously. It happens slowly over time. By cooling the body to around 32 degree celsius (90 degree farenehit), the body metabolism rate can be drastically reduced thus limiting the degree of damage to the vital organs, especially the brain.
For years, doctors have tried cooling people to limit damage from head and spinal cord injuries, strokes and even prematurity and birth trauma in newborns. It’s also used for cardiac arrest, when someone’s heart has stopped.
Doctors will be testing a new and dramatically speedier way of doing this for a much more common problem — heart attacks, which strike a million Americans each year.
“It’s extremely appealing” because the cooling system is non-invasive and can be used in an ordinary hospital room,” said Dr. George Sopko of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which is paying for this first-of-a-kind study.
Animal research suggests it will help, “but we need the hard evidence” from human tests to know, he said.
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