February 12, 2010
suspended animation, metabolic flexibility in mammals
Mark Roth is a cellular biologist who has studied using hydrogen sulfide to induce suspended animation as a way to increase the likelihood of survival in both traumatic injury and surgery.
But then you have these freaks of nature. . . . There’s a retrospective study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine ten years ago that shows that 50 percent of people who have been without a heartbeat for three hours [in cold conditions], and are re-warmed appropriately, survive without neurological problems. The people in that study spent at least three hours below 28 degrees. The record is a 29-year-old skier in Norway who went for nine hours. Her core temperature fell to below 14 degrees C. Remember, people are large bags of water; they take a long time to cool off and a long time to re-warm. It took her nine hours to get to a point where they could re-start her heart, and she went on to be the head radiologist in the hospital that treated her.
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