SIOUX CITY, Iowa (KTIV) -
Seconds count when someone is experiencing a heart attack. Doctors must protect the patient's vital organs that aren't receiving blood flow, especially the brain.
A treatment doctors use at Mercy Medical Center in Sioux City helps protect brain function and boost survival rates. It's called therapeutic hypothermia.
"Therapeutic hypothermia is when a patient comes in with a cardiac arrest and we cool the body temp down to between 32 and 34 degree Celsius," says Dr. Ross Bacon, the Director of Critical Care at Mercy Medical Center.
That's between 90 to 92 degrees Fahrenheit.
"It's not super cold, but cold enough to slow down the body's metabolism," says Bacon.
The goal is to slow down or stop the damage to an unresponsive patient's brain when they're having a heart attack.
"When people survive those types of out-of-hospital arrests, if their heart survives they usually die because of brain dysfunctions," says Bacon.
As soon as a patient arrives at the hospital, doctors and nurses start the cooling process with IV fluids, ice, or special cooling wraps. They wrap a patient's torso and legs in cooling blankets.
"In doing so we actually induce a deeper coma then what they are in already and we give muscle relaxants so there is no shivering or anything to stimulate the body temperature to increase," says Bacon.
They keep the patient cold for about 24 hours, then gradually warm them back up.
They've had good success with the treatment in patients who've maintained good brain function. Before therapeutic hypothermia, patients suffering from this type of heart attack had about a 40 percent survival rate. Now the survival rate is higher.
"Their survival rates at about 55 to 60 percent so there is a significant improvement in brain function by providing this time to allow the patient to recover from the insult," says Bacon.
Doctors at Mercy have used therapeutic hypothermia on about 30 patients from 18 years old to 80 over the last three years. They say many patients are able to return to their normal lives and even go back to work whereas before it might not have been possible.
Doctors use therapeutic hypothermia at Mercy Medical Center in Sioux City.
