- Cooling Therapy Can Save Heart Attack Victims – Report Reveals
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A procedure known as therapeutic hypothermia can drastically increase a heart attack victim’s chances of survival, according to medical evidence, but take up of the live-saving procedure at many hospitals in the US has been slow.
Even worse, those hospitals that do practice the procedure use it incompletely or inconsistently and often with dangerously long delays.
“There are probably thousands of people in this country who end up having severe brain damage because they don’t have access to this treatment,” said Dr. Benjamin Abella, a doctor at the Center for Resuscitation Science at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “It’s not subtle.”
A cardiac arrest stops circulation and the first organ to desperately need oxygen is the brain. It might seem logical that once the heart is started again the situation will gradually ease, but this isn’t the case.
The brain cells start a frenzy of activity upon the restart of circulation to the point where it becomes a toxic situation. The result can be enormous damage to large portions of the brain.
“The one thing that has a beneficial effect on every single one of these processes is cooling the tissue,” said Dr. Stephan A. Mayer, an expert in therapeutic hypothermia. He is also a neurologist at Columbia University in New York.
“Imagine a massive chemical burn injury. Cooling the tissue, hypothermia, is like throwing cold water on the whole response.”
For the past five years cooling therapy has been a standard part of resuscitation guidelines. It simply involves cooling the patient by about six degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours, then slowly warming the patient up again.
Emergency physicians up and down the country are now experiencing a more positive “we can do it” kind of attitude to the almost helplessness previously experienced in cardiac arrest cases where the heart stopped and had to be re-started.
Where before only around eight percent of the yearly 300,000 Americans who suffer a cardiac arrest survived, and many of them with severe brain damage too, now more than 50 percent can make it through intact, thanks to a simple procedure known as therapeutic hypothermia.
“We are pushing into the gray zone and grabbing people back,” said Dr. Benjamin Abella.
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