Health aNd Fitness Guide

It’s a ‘cool’ cure. Manuel Gonzalez-Brito and John Kuluz, professors of pediatric critical care medicine at the University of Miami, are researching how body-chilling devices minimize injuries tied to cardiac arrest, and brain and spinal cord traumas. Mild hypothermia, induced by cooling blankets, cooling helmets or chilled intravenous saline solution, can reduce brain and spinal cord swelling, and decrease inflammation, says Kuluz. Doctors, who induced hypothermia in the 1950s but stopped it in the ’70s after over-cooling harmed patients, resumed it after learning how to avoid the ill-effects by cooling to just two or three degrees Celsius below normal body temperature. Still there are intricacies to be worked out,like how to speed up the process (it can take two hours to lower an adult’s body temperature), how to avoid fluctuations in temperature, and how long patients can safely remain in a hypothermic state.