When the heart is stopped and restarted, the patient’s life may be saved but their brain is often permanently damaged. Therapeutic hypothermia, a treatment in which the patient’s body temperature is lowered and maintained several degrees below normal for a period of time, has been shown to mitigate these harmful effects and improve survival in adults.
Now, in the first large-scale multicenter study of its kind, physician-scientists are evaluating the effectiveness of the technique in infants and children.
Offered exclusively in New York by Columbia University Medical Center researchers at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, the Therapeutic Hypothermia After Pediatric Cardiac Arrest (THAPCA) trial is funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
“A tragedy no matter how it happens, cardiac arrest can occur in children either as a complication from a serious medical condition or due to an accident or sudden illness. While arrest in children is rare, currently no therapies have been shown to improve their chances of recovering,” says Dr. Charles Schleien, a pediatrician and anesthesiologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital…