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