Suspended Animation Technique Works To Save Traumatic Injury Patients
U.S. scientists will, for the first time, use a groundbreaking emergency technique to save lives.
The technique will involve placing gunshot or knife-wound victims in suspended animation, which is where people are still alive though they appear dead.
Doctors at a Pittsburgh, Penn.’s hospital will try saving the lives of 10 people who will be placed in the suspended animation state in the first human trials for the technique. If it’s successful, it could give doctors the time they need to treat patients who have been traumatically injured.
How the suspended animation technique works is this: doctors will replace the blood with a cold saline solution that will quickly drop the body’s temperature and stop most of the cellular activity.
UPMC Presbyterian Hospital surgeon Samuel Tisherman said they don’t like to call the procedure suspended animation because it sounds too much like science fiction. Tisherman is leading the trial and said the procedure has been dubbed emergency preservation and resuscitation.
Hasan Alam, who along with his University of Michigan Hospital colleagues, was the first to use suspended animation on pigs in 2002. The animals were first sedated and then had a massive hemorrhage induced to create the effect of several gunshot wounds. The blood was replaced with either a cold saline or potassium solution that dropped their temperature to 10 degrees Celsius.
Doctors treated the injuries and gradually warmed the animals up by replacing the solution with their blood. The pig’s heart would start beating and, even though the pig was “dead” for several hours, they suffered no cognitive or physical impairment.
Peter Rhee, a surgeon with Tucson’s University of Arizona, assisted in developing the technique and said the definition of dead was forever altered.
He said he works every day at a place he declares people dead. They have no brain activity or heartbeat – no signs they are alive. He said he signs a piece of paper knowing they’re not dead. Rhee could put them in suspended animation but must put their bodies in a body bag. Rhee said it’s aggravating when he knows a solution is available.
The procedure will be done on 10 people and compared to 10 others who did not go through the suspended animation process. Afterwards, Tisherman said, the method will be developed further until there is enough data to review.
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