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Health Watch: Cooling Heart Therapy

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Dec 15, 2008 7:00 pm US/Eastern

Health Watch: Cooling Heart Therapy

Reporting
Dr. Max Gomez
NEW YORK (CBS) ― A woman whose heart was stopped for at least 12 minutes because of a heart attack was saved by a medical treatment that brought her body temperature down by four degrees.

"Patients whose hearts have stopped for 12 minutes are at real risk for brain damage and we noticed that she was in a deep coma, so she was evaluated initially by a neurologist and noticed that she had some function of her brain, what we call brain stem reflexes, so eyes were moving, etc., but she was unable to respond to pain. She certainly wasn't responding to any of the voices that were speaking to her," said Dr. Michael Bergman of Long Island College Hospital.

"Remember in the morning feeling poorly, feeling faint," Katherine Salisbury said. Her husband, Ian, felt her jerk in the middle of the night. "It sounded like a cough or a gasp, but then after that she sort of wasn't there. She wasn't breathing and we couldn't really feel a pulse."

Salisbury was in full-blown cardiac arrest, resulting from a congential heart rhythm defect. By the time EMS got her to the hospital and doctors got her heart restarted it was at least 12 minutes.

That's when physicians at the Hospital decided to try a machine on her that allows precisely controlled chilling of her blood and body. "So we can hit our target temperature, which is 91, 92 degrees," Dr. Tucker Woods said.

A catheter that circulates chillled saline is inserted into an artery in the groin so that blood is cooled as it flows past. Salisbury was heavily sedated to prevent shivering and kept below 92 degrees for 24 hours, slowing the brain's metabolism and protecting it from further damage.

"The color of the skin, yeah. It didn't look, it was very sort of yellow, and I think she swelled quite a bit," Ian said.

The process is then reversed to carefully warm the patient over 12 hours. Afterwards, "her eyes started to move and then they sort of started to follow people as they moved around the room. And then she started mouthing words," Ian said.

"Physically, I am almost back to 100 percent and feeling like I wake up and I'm feeling like my old self again," Katherine said.

 

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