X-Message-Number: 15652
From: "Jan Coetzee" <>
Subject: Cooling May Improve Outcome in Severe Stroke 
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2001 21:40:16 -0500

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_03FF_01C09797.E2B14C60
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"

Cooling May Improve Outcome in Severe Stroke 

By Steven Reinberg 


FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. (Reuters Health) - For patients with severe stroke, cooling
their bodies appears to reduce the damage linked to reduced blood flow in the 
brain, according to results presented here at the 26th International Stroke 
Conference of the American Heart Association. 


Drs. Derk W. Krieger and Michael A. DeGeorgia from the Cleveland Clinic 
Foundation in Ohio studied 19 patients with severe stroke who failed to improve 
after clot-busting therapy. 


Ten of the patients were placed on respirators and their bodies cooled to a core
temperature of 90 degrees F, which was maintained for an average of 48 hours, 
Krieger told Reuters Health. Nine of the patients served as ``controls'' and did
not receive the cooling treatment. 


The cooling, or hypothermia, therapy was started an average of 6.2 hours after 
the onset of the stroke, with the target temperature reached 3.6 hours after 
starting therapy, Krieger noted. 


Ten percent of the control patients had good outcomes and 90% had poor outcomes,
Krieger reported. ``However, for the patients treated with hypothermia, 50% had
good outcomes and 50% had poor outcomes,'' he said. 


Using imaging techniques, the researchers found that stroke size was reduced in 
the patients who had undergone the cooling procedure. 


``Although these results are exciting, they are (also) very preliminary. So 
while induced hypothermia is feasible, and generally safe, more study needs to 
be done before it can be put into general use,'' Krieger cautioned. 


------=_NextPart_000_03FF_01C09797.E2B14C60

 Content-Type: text/html;

[ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] 

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15652