Welcome back to the podcast. The topic for discussion today is that of therapeutic hypothermia.

Now, therapeutic hypothermia is part of our resuscitation science. And people who have had cardiac arrest of various types of which we're going to talk about today have had improved neurological recovery with use of therapeutic hypothermia. So today we're going to talk about today have had improved neurological recovery with use of

therapeutic hypothermia. So today we're going to talk about what is therapeutic hypothermia,

how do we do it, and who benefits from it? And the idea that needs to be kept in mind is that this

is not some star-tracky kind of science here. This is science that has been validated by peer-reviewed literature.

And furthermore, it's an element that is considered part of advanced cardiac life support.

Several years ago, New York City EMS made an announcement that they were only going to transport

patients after cardiac arrest to hospitals that did therapeutic hypothermia.

One of the strategies that I'll sometimes do while doing a presentation with a PowerPoint kind of deal in an auditorium is put the references up there.

And if this is 2010, include references from, say, the year 2000. Some might look at that

and say, well, your references are somewhat dated. The other technique that you can use with that

is making the point that the topic of what we're discussing is not something new. This is something

that has been around for quite some time, but for whatever

reason, we've been slow to adopt. Despite publications of two randomized controlled trials of

therapeutic hypothermia after cardiac arrest, demonstrating a clear neurological outcome and an

improvement in mortality over a decade ago, use of therapeutic hypothermia after cardiopulmonary

ascitation remains low. In the case of pre-hospital cardiac arrest, it's estimated between

265,000 and 325,000 cases of out-of-hospital or pre-hospital cardiac arrest occur annually in the United States.

Of this number, only 6% of patients survived to discharge, and there's a marked variation in rates of survival between various institutions.

Any provider who has provided advanced cardiac life support or cardiopulmonary

or association of a patient and has been able to render a survival is always very concerned

about what the unknown neurological recovery of the patient is.

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