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Cool Medical Tool

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SUNCOAST NEWS STAFF REPORT

Published: May 7, 2008

SUNCOAST NEWS STAFF REPORT

Doctors have long known cooling is a way to protect body tissue from injury in people suffering heart attacks or similar medical emergencies. The ways doctors have been using to cool patients, however, can take hours to lower body temperature to a level at which tissue is protected.

Tackling this problem, an engineering professor at the University of Rhode Island has created the Thermosuit. The plastic suit encases unconscious patients while flooding their bodies with cold water to induce hypothermia.

With the Thermosuit, the time to cool a patient to protective levels can be reduced from hours to around 30 minutes.

The American Heart Association recommends that people who have suffered a cardiac arrest should have their body temperatures lowered to from 89.6 to 93.2 degrees Fahrenheit and maintained in that state from 12 to 24 hours. The normal human body temperature is around 98.6 degrees.

William Ohley, a Rhode Island professor of engineering has joined colleagues in developing the Thermosuit. They have now formed Life Recovery Systems, a company to which Ohley is a consultant.

Ohley began developing the Thermosuit in 2001. He received $1.25 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health through its Small Business Innovation Research grants program to develop and test the device. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave Life Recovery Systems permission to market Thermosuit as a cooling device in 2006.

The device is now being tested in a number of hospitals, mostly in the New England area and Louisiana, according to a University spokesman, Todd McLeish.

One reason Ohley and his colleagues developed Thermosuit is the statistic that says only from 10 to 20 percent of the people whose hearts stop beating and then are brought back to life fully recover. Most suffer some form of brain damage because their brains were deprived of oxygen too long, even while being resuscitated.

"But if doctors can rapidly induce hypothermia and reduce the patient's body temperature by three to five degrees Centigrade, their chances of a full recovery are significantly greater," Ohley said.

In the hospitals where Thermosuit is being used, the survival rate for cardiac arrest sufferers has risen from about 35 percent to 60 to 70 percent, according to Ohley.

Ohley believes that stroke patients and those with brain and spinal cord injuries may also benefit from its use.

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