That whole hypothermia treatment for cardiac arrests? Not so fast…

 

Despite the best claims of tv shows, the actual survival rates of people in cardiac arrest is in the one percent rate. Or worse. There’s been lots of continuing research to try to improve the figures.

One new treatment that’s been getting a lot of hype, hope, and publicity is induced hypothermia, namely taking the patients and quickly cooling them down, in the hope that this will reduce brain damage and give the patient a better chance at recovery.
The New England Journal of Medicine just reported on a study that casts, err, cold water on this:

Conclusions

In unconscious survivors of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest of presumed cardiac cause, hypothermia at a targeted temperature of 33°? C[91.4 F] did not confer a benefit as compared with a targeted temperature of 36 C [96.8 F].
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1310519

About these ads