How Effective is Body Cooling in Patients that Experience Cardiac Arrest? – Michigan Medicine

Meurer and Silbergleit are principal investigators of a new clinical trial that will explore whether whole-body cooling improves the survival and recovery of comatose patients after a cardiac arrest, and if increasing durations of cooling are associated with better outcomes and recovery in these patients.

Meurer and Silbergleit are joined by Romergryko Geocadin, M.D., from Johns Hopkins Medicine, as well as Sharon Yeatts, Ph.D., and Ramesh Ramakrishnan, Ph.D., from Medical University of South Carolina, as leaders of the study, which is funded by nearly $30 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health.

The research team notes that the study is unique, as it will explore body cooling in patients resuscitated from shockable cardiac arrest and non-shockable cardiac arrest.

Most previous research has only studied patients whose hearts were restarted with a defibrillator, a device that gives an electrical shock to restart a heart that has stopped beating, says Meurer, a member of the Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care.

These patients are easier to study and already do better than those with other types of cardiac arrest, called asystole or pulseless electrical activity, that dont respond to defibrillation and who typically have longer periods of cardiac arrest.

Silbergleit adds, Body cooling has appeared in the past to increase the rate of good neurological outcomes in patients resuscitated from shockable rhythms, but even in the most optimistic prior research, no more than 50% of these patients get better.

Silbergleit says thats not good enough.

We want to do better than that, he says. In addition, whether body cooling works in the half of patients that get resuscitated from asystole and pulseless electrical activity has never been studied before in a randomized study.

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How Effective is Body Cooling in Patients that Experience Cardiac Arrest? - Michigan Medicine