SoylentNews

Humans Put Into Suspended Animation For First Time

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 26 2019, @12:31PM   
from the re-animator dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/nov/20/humans-put-into-suspended-animation-for-first-time

Doctors have put humans into a state of suspended animation for the first time in a groundbreaking trial that aims to buy more time for surgeons to save seriously injured patients.

The process involves rapidly cooling the brain to less than 10C by replacing the patient’s blood with ice-cold saline solution. Typically the solution is pumped directly into the aorta, the main artery that carries blood away from the heart to the rest of the body.

Known formally as emergency preservation and resuscitation, or EPR, the procedure is being trialled on people who sustain such catastrophic injuries that they are in danger of bleeding to death and who suffer a heart attack shortly before they can be treated. The patients, who are often victims of stabbings or shootings, would normally have less than a 5% chance of survival.

[...] Rapid cooling of trauma victims is designed to reduce brain activity to a near standstill and to slow the patient’s physiology enough to give surgeons precious extra minutes, perhaps more than an hour, to operate. Once the patient’s injuries have been attended to, they are warmed up and resuscitated.

One aim of the US trial is to reduce the brain damage that patients are often left with if they survive such serious injuries. When the heart stops and blood stops circulating, the brain quickly becomes starved of oxygen, suffering irreparable damage within about five minutes.

The trial will compare the outcomes of 20 men and women who receive standard emergency care or EPR. The trial is due to run until the end of the year, and full results are not expected until late 2020.

One complication of the procedure is that patients’ cells can become damaged as they are warmed up after surgery.

Also reported at:

• https://www.engadget.com/2019/11/20/human-patient-put-in-suspended-animation-for-the-first-time/
• https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-11-medical-trauma-patient-state-animation.html

---

Original Submission

• medical progress takes forever medical progress takes forever (Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday November 26 2019, @12:42PM (4 children)

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday November 26 2019, @12:42PM (#924885) Journal

  ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01042015
  First Posted : January 5, 2010
  Last Update Posted : August 14, 2019

  Actual Study Start Date : October 2016

  Can Hypothermia Save Gunshot Victims? [archive.is]

  *SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

  In 1990, Tisherman and his colleagues published their first results. The findings were groundbreaking: dogs that had effectively died from blood loss and then been rapidly cooled to 59 degrees could be brought back to life an hour later with no brain damage. The cold reduced metabolic activity so precipitously that the oxygen that remained in the animal’s tissues from its final few breaths was sufficient to prevent brain death. During the next several years, by refining their technique and reducing their target temperature, the Pittsburgh group gradually managed to extend the interval between death and resuscitation to three hours.

  As evidence mounted that suspended animation might actually work, other researchers joined the field. In 1996, Hasan Alam and Peter Rhee, researchers at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, in Bethesda, used pigs to expand on Tisherman’s successes. “We got to the stage where we could convert a hundred-per-cent-lethal injury to about a ninety-, ninety-five-per-cent survival rate, neurologically intact,” Alam told me.

  [...] By 2002, Tisherman and Safar were convinced that they had assembled enough evidence to test suspended animation in humans. But it took another twelve years to put together the protocols, approvals, and funding necessary for a clinical trial, and, in 2003, Peter Safar died, at the age of seventy-nine. Although each year seemed to bring fresh evidence of the power of cold temperatures to preserve and protect, suspended animation in humans remained a promising but unproved idea.

  [...] On April 12, 2015, a twenty-five-year-old black man named Freddie Gray arrived at Shock Trauma in a coma. His spinal cord had been severed while he was in the custody of six police officers, and he died a week later. Gray’s death—like those of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and other African-Americans who were killed by police in recent years—provoked an outcry against racism and brutality in law enforcement. There were demonstrations across the country, and in Baltimore the protests lasted two weeks.

  Six months later, on a breezy blue Friday morning, Tisherman, wearing pink scrubs, sat quietly behind a folding table in the atrium at Mondawmin Mall. On the day of Gray’s funeral, the mall, in West Baltimore, had been a flash point of confrontation among police clad in riot gear, protesters, and looters, but now the scene was placid. Shoppers strolled, people from a drug-treatment program were distributing needles, and the Black Mental Health Alliance offered free lip balm and brochures detailing its services. Tisherman and Leslie Sult, a clinical-research nurse, were handing out laser-printed leaflets about E.P.R., as part of a community consultation required before the trial could proceed. Among the difficulties facing the trial has been an ethical concern: enrollment is not voluntary. Prospective patients, being clinically dead, will be incapable of giving consent, and the speed of treatment—the decision to begin E.P.R. has to be made within a matter of seconds—precludes identifying, let alone contacting, the next of kin. (The F.D.A. requires informed consent for all human medical trials, but it does grant exceptions for emergency research.)

  In Baltimore, the issue of waived consent has disquieting social implications. Of the more than nine hundred people who were shot in the city last year—three hundred of whom died—more than ninety per cent were male, more than ninety per cent were black, and most were under the age of thirty. In the predominantly African-American neighborhoods of West Baltimore, thirty per cent of households live below the federal poverty line. As these neighborhoods lie just north of Shock Trauma, it is a virtual certainty that the first person to be selected for E.P.R. will be black, low-income, and male.

  Because of the consent issue, an institutional review board at the University of Maryland required Tisherman to devise a way for people to elect not to be enrolled in advance. He designed a red rubber bracelet, in the style of Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong wristbands, that says “no to epr-cat.” (E.P.R.-CAT is the trial’s full name; “CAT” stands for “cardiac arrest from trauma.”) Anyone wanting to opt out could request one and wear it at all times. Another stipulation made by the board was the community-consultation process. Over a three-month period, Tisherman and Sult visited various public spaces, distributing flyers, answering questions, and conducting surveys. There were interviews on local TV and radio stations, and ads in the city’s newspapers.

  --
  [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+4
  Informative=4, Total=4
  Extra 'Informative' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		5

• Re:medical progress takes forever Re:medical progress takes forever (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday November 26 2019, @03:06PM (1 child)

  by mhajicek (51) on Tuesday November 26 2019, @03:06PM (#924927)

  If they wanted they could have made it opt-in by handing out "yes" bracelets.

  --
  The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek

  Parent

  • Re:medical progress takes forever (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday November 26 2019, @10:04PM

    by MostCynical (2589) on Tuesday November 26 2019, @10:04PM (#925119) Journal

    Thereby artificially limiting the number of potential participants

    --
    "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

    Parent

• Re:medical progress takes forever (Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday November 27 2019, @02:27AM

  by driverless (4770) on Wednesday November 27 2019, @02:27AM (#925204)

  Actually this has been happening for centuries at least. Whenever parliament is in session, the majority of the house except for the few people speaking go into suspended animation.

  Parent

• Re:medical progress takes forever (Score: 1, Redundant) by driverless on Wednesday November 27 2019, @02:29AM

  by driverless (4770) on Wednesday November 27 2019, @02:29AM (#925208)

  Actually this has been happening for centuries at least. Whenever parliament is in session,

  Parent