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In some less extreme cases, a person may regain consciousness when wrapped in warm blankets, taken indoors, or treated with a machine which blows hot air throughout the body. But once a person’s heart and breathing stop, the best way to revive them, doctors say, is through a process known as extracorporeal rewarming — extract blood from a person’s body, heat it externally, enrich it with oxygen, and pump it back.
Patients who survive this procedure often have little or no cognitive damagethe doctors say.
Hermann Brugger, a physician and deputy director of the Institute of Mountain Emergency Medicine in Bolzano, Italy, described a case where doctors using this method were able revive a climber rescued during a storm that had no blood circulation for more than eight hours. In another case, a man buried in an avalanche For 100 minutes he survived. None suffered any neurological damage, she said.
More than 100 people Those who suffered hypothermia have survived after being resuscitated using similar techniques over the past few decades in Central Europe, according to A study.
But not all doctors and emergency medical workers are familiar with the warming technique, Dr. Brugger said. He cited a case in which a 16-year-old girl found without pulse after spending hours in the cold they had been declared dead before extracorporeal warming was attempted. “An emergency doctor tried to resuscitate on the spot, but this makes no sense, because if you don’t rewarm the body, you can resuscitate it for as long as you want and it’s completely useless,” he added, pointing out that there was blood from the girl. If she had been rewarmed externally, it is most likely that she would have survived.
In the case of the television “corpuscle,” Dr. Zafren said the men seemed very rigid, but not frozen. If they had been exposed to the cold for more than 24 hours, he added, they would have had little chance of survival and would not have recovered spontaneously without an external source of heat.
Besides, he said, the officer couldn’t have broken the bone in a man’s arm, whether it was frozen or not.
“Be mostly dead It is being somewhat alive,” Dr. Zafren said. So far, doctors have not been able to determine the exact point of no return, he added. “But what we do know is that if you’re dead for too long, you don’t come back.”