Suspended animation is becoming a life-saving medical procedure | Hacker News Reader

Suspended animation is becoming a life-saving medical procedure

prime.nautil.us

96 pointsdnetesn15 comments

Looks like an expansion of this work: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-12/save-soldie...

Also, there's this trial going on to cool the body to increase the time surgeons have: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140402-suspe...

I think the first time I recall some interesting work in suspended animation was in ~2006. It's impressive to see how far the techniques have come since then.

Hypothermia has been used increase the time surgeons have for more than half a century

> In 1950, after four years of research, our Toronto team reported to medical science the first successful open heart operation on record. Using hypothermia and animals, the body temperature was lowered, the blood entering the heart was stopped and the heart was opened for 20 minutes. Following this report to a senior American society, hypothermia became a sensation and dominated the surgical scientific literature for 10 years.

> In 1954, after further research, the first open heart operation on a human patient in Canada was carried out by our team at the Toronto General Hospital, using hypothermia. Hypothermia became the most common form of open heart surgery between 1954 and 1960 in the few cardiac surgery centres that existed around the world.

http://www.chrcrm.org/en/salute-excellence/hypothermia-open-...

This sort of thing is by now routine, and also is used for some brain surgeries.

It's been difficult for me to understand whats new enough about this that it has been making the rounds in the news. Some of the new stories a few months ago seem sparked by a recent clinical trial, which (I think) was sorta novel in that it used these techniques in emergent situations.

It seems likely the Nautilus article is related to the mentioned paper, which was published in November:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

This is impressive. Any know if this is supposed to be just for hearts, or could be used for strokes too?

It should be useful for anything doctors can fix if they have the time.

Here's an article from 2014 in which they discuss a trial testing hypothermia for trauma patients who've bled out:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/23/tech/innovation/suspended-anim...

Yea, that was the one I was thinking of in my top reply to brd :)

In August 2009, I suffered an aortic dissection. This was repaired via Dacron stint during open heart surgery. I was "dead" (no perfusion) for 43 minutes.

Reading this reminds me of the "Mistakes Were Made" This American Life podcast [1]. It's amazing how much we've learned in the last 50 years & how far we have to go in order to get to what we've seen in movies [2]

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/354/m...

[2] http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/4156/explain-hyper...

The Milwaukee protocol is an experimental course of treatment of an infection of rabies in a human being. The treatment involves putting the patient into a chemically induced coma and administering antiviral drugs.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_protocolWikipedia

The article doesn't mention the impact of loss of oxygen to the brain. I would have to assume, that if this is moving to human trials, that there is evidence that this reduces or eliminates the effect of oxygen deprivation on the brain?

Doesn't sound like they're using 100% H2S, I'm sure that would do all kinds of nasty things:

> he soon demonstrated that exposing mice to 80 parts per million of the gas mixed at room temperature made it possible to create a reversible suspended animation

I would suspect that, since the whole method of action seems to be to reduce the cells' metabolic need for oxygen, there wouldn't be damaged from "deprivation" because the cells would still be getting all the oxygen they required.

You only need oxygen for metabolic activity. When you cool the brain, you can slow oxygen metabolism enormously.

It's common to go without perfusion to the brain for up to an hour during certain surgeries.

Perhaps somewhat related, in that slowing metabolism saves tissue:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9226848

H2S-induced suspended animation featured in Alastair Reynold's sci-fi novel Pushing Ice, which I've mentioned earlier in another context. Recommended as a good read.

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