Life is uncertain. In a moment, you might be engaged in some sort of activity, but in the next you can experience cardiac arrest. After your heart starts beating again, you probably would develop a great appreciation for the value of life. You would also likely feel this appreciation even more keenly if your recovery does not include only a heartbeat but also your brain and normal cognition, since probably nobody wants to be in the vegetative state, where people live only in body and not in mind!
Prolong brain function… by lowering body temperature.
After a cardiac arrest, the brain will suffer from a shortage of blood supply, and brain cells will very quickly die. When doctors rescue the patient and makes all the necessary preparations, they will start by reducing the patient’s body temperature below normal to around 33 degrees Celsius and keep this constant for about 24 hours.
Lowering temperature can restore function to the brain from a dangerous situation, but there can be complications during treatment. As a result, doctors have to assess risks and make preparations to prevent some co-presenting symptoms like chills in order to obtain good responses. Then, after controlling the body’s temperature according to the specified duration, the doctors will gradually adjust the physical condition of the patient back to normal.
Giving the patient CPR after suffering a cardiac arrest is necessary, but that is not everything! We have to quickly bring the patient to a hospital as soon as possible in order to transfer the patient to a medical specialist who can treat the patient by reducing the patient’s temperature in order to aid the patient’s recovery to be able to live normally as before.
