Human "Suspended Animation" Trials To Start This Month 104
An anonymous reader writes in with news about a UPMC Presbyterian Hospital trial starting this month which brings us one step closer to suspended animation. "The researchers behind it don't want to call it suspended animation, but it's the most conventional way to explain it. The world's first humans trials will start at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, with 10 patients whose injuries would otherwise be fatal to operate on. A team of surgeons will remove the patient's blood, replacing it with a chilled saline solution that would cool the body, slowing down bodily functions and delaying death from blood loss. According to Dr. Samuel Tisherman, talking to New Scientist: 'We are suspending life, but we don't like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction... we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation.'" We covered this story a few months ago when it was announced.
New film title (Score:2)
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Wasn't there a bad Sci-fi film called Re-Animator [imdb.com] with some wild-eyed doctor on the cover wielding a gigantic syringe?
Re:But hold on... (Score:5, Insightful)
Science fiction is cool and full of stuff we'd be excited to see happen. "Emergency preservation and resuscitation" doesn't sound at all interesting.
That's only because you're not the one with an injury which would be fatal to operate on.
If you were, and your alternatives were "Death" or "Tea and cake, then death", then it would sound pretty damn awesome.
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If you were, and your alternatives were "Death" or "Tea and cake", then it would sound pretty damn awesome.
I'll have the fish.
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Thanks for flying Church of England!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
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We've run out of cake.
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The cake is a LIE!!
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Nuke the damn thing from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
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We've run out of cake.
OH GOD We're all gonna die!
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that's where the chilled "suspended" part comes in... to make the body mostly inactive.
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Re:I'm not a doctor, but... (Score:5, Informative)
First, I am a doctor, and I know both Drs Tisherman, and Rhee, having met both in person and having read many of both of their papers. They are both stellar leaders in the field of trauma surgery. I am therefore posting as AC to avoid the perception of any even quasi-official criticism. These are my thoughts on the subject and are meant only to educate the readership, not to try to detract from the work cited
Second, I'm not jumping on " confused one"'s post, just taking an opportunity to correct a minor misconception, and use it as a hook to provide some detail as I understand them.
cold enough to shut everything off, but not cold enough to damage cells. Basic principle originates in all those "miraculous" drowning victims who fall through winter ice and are resuscitated 20 or 30 minutes later.
The "miraculous drowning victims" to which you refer usually survive due to the mammalian diving reflex [wikipedia.org], which is a distinct event (although hypothermia is involved) involving a slowing of the heart, vasoconstriction, and a closing of the glottic opening due to the face being submerged. The principle this proposed technique is using is more of a physio-chemical slowing of the reactions in the whole body, but of prime importance the heart, kidneys, and brain (and to a lesser extent the liver and lungs).
The proposed candidate patients (I presume, not having read their IRB nor their treatment protocol) would involve patients with penetrating trauma (knife or GSW) that have already had a resuscitative thoracotomy [wikipedia.org] (as per my interpretation of the New Scientist article [newscientist.com]). This means that the patient is either in extremis [merriam-webster.com], or has lost vital signs (no B/P, no pulse), at this point, under certain criteria, the chest is opened and the heart prolapsed from the pericardium, the aorta is cross-clamped and open massage or defibrillation is performed along with massive volume resuscitation. For these patients, this is literally, pulling out all the stops to try to save them. It often has a low survivability (~7%) as there is literally nothing else that can be done....until this trial.
The effect would be to suspend cellular aerobic metabolism [wikipedia.org] and induce a state of hypometabolism that could be sustained by anaerobic metabolism [wikipedia.org]. Not quite the suspended animation of science fiction. This would limit the amount of oxygen radicals that can lead to reperfusion syndrome [wikipedia.org], but this is not a given.
The questions that remain: how will humans as a "higher lifeform" with a more temperamental neurological makeup deal with this hypometabolic state? Will they be able to cool them fast enough in the hectic conditions of a trauma-code to be useful? What will their neurological status be? What about the blood already lost - the patient will likely need significant transfusions, will this reduce the effectiveness of the treatment due to transfusion related lung injury [wikipedia.org] or transfusion related immunosuppression [sciencedirect.com]. Will the patient tolerate the hypothermia as this is traditionally considered a part of the lethal triad [wikipedia.org], for that matter, saline is a very acidic substance (to the body), how will they tolerate that acidosis (also part of the triad). I hope they are able to obtain useful information about these (and other) questions that may make this a viab
mod up (Score:2)
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It works for other mammals, humans just require some technical details sorted out and good protocols made. Regarding possible injuries from the cooling: It doesn't really matter, if it saves lives, it saves lives.
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When I saw this article's headline, I first thought it was about this [ted.com], but this is clearly something quite different. Do you know anything about the hydrogen sulphite idea discussed in the video?
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Thanks for an informative post, complete with wikipedia links for people like me who do not understand many of these medical terms. Its not very often that a poster will go to this length to make an informative and useful post.
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So glad I read this... (Score:2)
Any more when I see a long AC comment, I frequently scroll past it due to the APK troll.
I'm glad I stopped for just a second. Marvelous comment. Thank you.
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saline is a very acidic substance (to the body), how will they tolerate that acidosis
Can't they just use Ringer's Lactate or Hartmann's solution instead? That should buffer the acidity a little bit better.
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So that made me wonder:
With an injured person who might not ordinarily have time to reach medical help, is there any benefit to deliberately triggering this diving reflex?
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Yes, but at the temperatures they're inducing, metabolic activity is basically nil, meaning oxygen essentially isn't needed, at least over the time frames they're talking about.
I'm not a doctor, but... (Score:1)
The idea is that the body WON'T be receiving oxygen while in that state. And that it won't have to. The saline solution and the cooling is supposed to prevent tissue deterioration even in the absence of the oxygen-fueled human metabolism, so that when the normal blood is returned and the person raised back to standard body temperature later, they will still be alive.
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I had a similar thought, that if the replacement fluid included an antibacterial agent (perhaps a bacteria-specific virus engineered to suicide after a few generations, if such a thing is possible) that killed off every bacterium in its path -- that would greatly reduce the risk of an introduced infection, and if you have have to repopulate regions like the gut that can't function without bacteria, well, that's not hard to accomplish.
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You're most likely thinking of this comment [slashdot.org]. Anyway, it was a similar procedure, but was by no means the same as the one being discussed here. Namely, his procedure involved no saline solution, and the chilling came before the removal of blood, rather than as part of the same step, suggesting that he was chilled via some external mechanism (my father worked in a hospital when he was in college in the late '60s to early '70s, and he's mentioned that for people with high fevers, they would, if I recall correc
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I had one of those alcohol ice baths when I was 15 in 1974. I was admitted comatose with 105F fever due to tonsillitis. The infection had spread beyond the tonsils. I went from a sore throat to unconscious in less that 10 hours.
I was in the intensive care for 5 days.
It's crude, but it works.
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You'd be better off getting on a space ship going the speed of light for a year.
No need to become a popsicle, and your life will not be dependent on people remembering to pay the electric bill before your thaw date
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the only way to make a space ship go at the speed of light would be to convert it to photons or some other rest-massless particle (and incidentally throwing a twin for every such particle in the opposite direction). we already know how that could be done, via antimatter anhilation, but reassembling the spaceship from massless particles is left as exercise for the student.
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Traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light will do the same thing and is possible without said annihilation :P
Project Orion. (Score:2)
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Yes, but you will be a significant fraction of a light year away from Earth at the end of the trip. Traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light away from Earth. I don't see the upside here.
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actually, even going 0.99 C time dilation is only 7 to 1. Hit a pebble, your ship will be annihilated
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So you're saying all those sci fi books lied to me? :(
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Matter/Antimatter annihilation does not necessarily send the created photons into opposite directions.
And definitely not on a grand scale.
Well, but if you can manage to introduce me to my anti matter twin, I will be pleased to meet him. Once and for all we will settle the question who the evil twin is!
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you would have to involve other particles with mass for that to be true, conversation of momentum demands it
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Exactly, or not ...
The two particles, the matter and the antimatter one, already HAVE momentum. So if they annihilate into gamma quants it is very very unlikely that the two quants fly into exact opposite direction.
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Well the OP isn't suggesting extending his life. He's suggesting going into suspended animation so he can go see what the future looks like, and if we manage to survive as a society.
If you decide to go get frozen for a thousand years, you're putting an awful lot of trust in the people maintaining your equipment. I remember a story some years back that one of these cryogenic places went bankrupt, and they thawed and buried the bodies.
You face a similar risk if you decide to "time travel" in this manner, a
Looks Like, Walks Like, Quacks Like (Score:5, Interesting)
We are suspending life, but we don't like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction... we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation.
Someone needs to remind these guys that something is only Science Fiction until it becomes Science Fact.
Nothing wrong with calling it Suspended Animation if that's EXACTLY what it is.
Re:Looks Like, Walks Like, Quacks Like (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing wrong with calling it Suspended Animation if that's EXACTLY what it is.
I think that the problem they are trying to avoid is that most people have a preconceived ideas as to what "Suspended Animation" should be. These people are trying as much as possible to stay away from those preconceived ideas, and hence avoid being ridiculed for not living up to a hundred years of sic-fi hype.
As an analogy, what would happen to a company that after years of design and testing released A FLYING CAR!!!! But play down the fact that this car could only perform vertical flight limited to 6 feet high whilst in your own driveway, solely to facilitate under car maintenance? Sure it flies, and it is useful, but it don't quite meet all those expectations.
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Bad analogy. Noone would market a car as a "flying car" is the only flight it could do is lift up enough to make it easier to change the oil.
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Bad analogy. Noone would market a car as a "flying car" is the only flight it could do is lift up enough to make it easier to change the oil.
Why is it a bad analogy? All these doctors are doing is chilling people down in order to perform a brief surgery, so I can understand why they are trying to stay away from a moniker of "SUSPENDED ANIMATION!!!!!"
The point I was making with my analogy is that a flying car company wouldn't do it either.
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I think that the problem they are trying to avoid is that most people have a preconceived ideas as to what "Suspended Animation" should be
From Websters:
suspended animation noun: a state in which the processes of the body (such as blood circulation) stop or become very slow for a period of time while a person or animal is unconscious
Websters et al create definition of words and phrases based upon what the common consensus of their meaning is. The Scientists are just making an arrogant attempt to pre-empt the inevitable media hype that will happen regardless of how they try to spin it.
Arrogant? Yes, because it shows a condescending and cynical
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We are suspending life, but we don't like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction... we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation.
Someone needs to remind these guys that something is only Science Fiction until it becomes Science Fact.
Nothing wrong with calling it Suspended Animation if that's EXACTLY what it is.
It's not. This seems more like an induced coma than anything. I doubt it slows or stops aging which is what I would call suspended animation. This may be, however, the first step towards that goal.
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more test subjects (Score:2)
I think I know where they can find 535 more test subjects ;-)
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Pretty sure we don't want to keep that set around.
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Pretty sure we don't want to keep that set around.
Control group. Instead of saline, they'll be injected with grape jelly.
+1 No one will be able to tell the difference. (Score:2)
Link to Original Source (Score:2)
Bon Voyage (Score:2)
I wish the experimental subjects well. If the procedure works, they will not only be saving themselves, but many future patients whose injuries can't be treated quickly enough. And if the procedure becomes routine, it may someday pave humanity's road to the stars.
Saline? (Score:1)
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I say we define people whose animation is suspended by this technique to BE "zombies" and "the undead"
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While you're being a bit snarky, actually the sterile nature of the fluid will be quite important. We already have staph infections running around hospitals; you might indeed have a situation where people die because they get "bad fluid" much the same way in the early days of HIV you got people who were infected because there was not adequate screening.
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Or the word does not mean what you think it means. Or perhaps what you wrote comes across differently then what you intended :P
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See, I have the superpower of being able to admit that i'm wrong and frequently acknowledge my fallibility. So the first thing that occured to me upon reading your comment was that perhaps my understanding of the word snarky was wrong.
I checked. It's not.
True, I can't compensate for people who read things that aren't there...
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Well I would define "snarky" as comments made by someone trying to be a curmudgeon, and a wise ass.
Checking the dictionary, I see I'm right (although they use a bit different phrasing: 1: crotchety, snappish
2: sarcastic, impertinent, or irreverent in tone or manner )
Are you telling me you were NOT being sarcastic, and you really believe the results of this research will be zombies?
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I know the tendency of slashdotters to read-between-the-lines when there isn't anything there, and I actually specifically chose every single word in that sentence to not be loaded. It does not criticize or implicate any parties, it is as precise as necessary, there is no slang or words with double meanings. It is as literal and devoid of possible misinterpretations as possible...
or so I thought.
Because obviously, (Score:3)
Anything that sounds like science fiction MUST be terrible and is to be avoided at all costs.
Re:Because obviously, (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, if you're doing real research and want to be taken seriously, I can see why you'd prefer to differentiate yourself a little.
If you said "and we'll put the patient into suspended animation", and the ethics review board rolls their eyes at you, you might have a huge problem.
Some stuff, sure, it can sound like science fiction. But for medical research, you'd think you want to make sure people know you're not just talking out of your ass.
Herbert West, Re-Animator (Score:2)
I know how this story turns out...
Loia McMaster Bujold (Score:2)
Sounds like something similar to what Lois McMasterBujold described about 20 years ago.
Re:Lois McMaster Bujold (Score:2)
Yet still following Frederick Pohl's "Age of the Pussyfoot [wikipedia.org]", ca. 1969, wherein a fireman, badly burned, is suspended as no tech is yet available to remediate his injuries.
In this book, Pohl not only covers suspension for later remediation, but also basically describes the modern cellphone, although ours don't have quite as many features as his does. Yet. :) Also some other very cool tech and social ideas.
There are quite a few great ideas that you might think came out of the 80's and 90's SF writers minds, b
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Does Pohl describe replacing the blood with a cryofluid as Bujold does?
House S2:E02 "Autopsy" (Score:2)
sad (Score:1)
Red Dwarf (Score:1)
Rather than suspended animation, they should invent the Stasis chamber in Red Dwarf. (Then wake up 3 million years later with the descendants of your evolved cat!)
What was it originally used for? Oh yeah, to suspend crewman David Lister for 18 months without pay...