With the help of cold and saline solution, US physicians want to keep seriously injured people alive. For some years now, they have been trying out a treatment in which patients' blood is exchanged for saline and the body is cooled, the magazine "New Scientist" reported on Thursday.
Media worldwide took up the message. From the factual report in the "New Scientist" were in the German press while exciting headlines: "Sensation surgery after cardiac arrest: 1. Man deep frozen and revived," headlined about the Bildzeitung. "Focus Online" moved on. The reality is different.
According to "New Scientist" the body temperature of the patients was reduced to 10 to 15 degrees over a period of two hours, usually 37 degrees. The aim of this measure is to avoid brain damage in a cardiac arrest. Because when the blood in the body no longer circulates, no oxygen arrives in the brain. Within a few minutes, irreparable damage will then occur in our mind.
Whether the patients have woken up is unclear
By cooling down the body, this development can be slowed down. Metabolic processes in the cells then run at a reduced pace, the body and thus the brain, require less oxygen. Doctors then have more time for life-saving operations. According to the US medical team, it is possible with their method to treat such cooled patients with circulatory arrest for about two hours without the brain being damaged.
But there is a catch: reheating the body can have fatal consequences for the cells. And so far it is not known how many patients have survived the experiments. Study leader Samuel Tisherman of the University of Maryland's School of Medicine in Baltimore hopes to release "New Scientist" results by the end of 2020. Only then will it be clear in how many patients the method was tested.
Use in patients who have lost more than half of their blood
The idea of cooling down the body in an emergency situation in order to gain time is not new. Twenty years ago, physicians developed therapeutic hypothermia.
People with cardiovascular failure are already cooled during or immediately after the resuscitation - with special pads, infusions or ice bags. Also during heart surgery the body temperature is partly lowered. However, this is usually a few degrees - and not up to 27 degrees.
The US researchers combine the method of cooling with the injection of saline into the bloodstream.
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According to the article in "New Scientist", the doctors are testing the procedure for patients who are admitted to the hospital with a serious injury such as a wound or puncture wound and who have a cardiac arrest. The condition for the experimental treatment is also that the injured lost more than half of their blood and only have a chance of survival of less than five percent. Otherwise, the tests could not be ethically represented.
"That the principle works, we know from animal experiments," said Bernd Böttiger, Chairman of the German Council for Resuscitation. As far as he knows, humans have not yet been tested on humans. Whether and how well the procedure works, therefore, can be estimated only with a number of previously unavailable data, according to the Director of the Department of Anaesthesiology and Operative Intensive Care Medicine of the University Hospital Cologne.