
A portable ‘brain cooler’ could help save the lives of many cardiac patients for whom current treatment is ineffective.
Thousands of people suffer heart attacks each year, but only 5 to 10 per cent of people are successfully resuscitated. A defibrillator machine, which delivers electric shocks, is usually used to get the heart to restart.
Brain cooling is being heralded as the technology with the greatest potential to improve survival rates.
Two studies in 2002, published in the New England Journal Of Medicine, established the importance of body cooling after cardiac arrest. Researchers found patients whose bodies were cooled had improved survival rates and that their brains functioned better in the months following the arrest.
A new portable cooling device, called the BeneChill, can be used conveniently and easily, even without medical training.
The device was invented by Dr Denise Barbut, a UK-trained neurologist now living in New York. She took advantage of the unique anatomy of the nose, which contains many blood vessels designed to warm the air you breathe in.
The device uses perfluorochemicals (PFCs) chemicals already widely used in eye surgery and for liquid ventilation of the lungs that are stored in small canisters and delivered to the nose in a fine mist through a nasal tube inserted into each nostril.
Once PFCs hit the back of the nose, they evaporate and remove heat from the nose. The resulting temperature drop transfers directly to the brain, which lies adjacent to the nasal cavity. BeneChill can achieve a two degree drop in one hour up to six times faster than many other available methods.
(Source)