Ice Slurry for Sudden Cardiac Arrest

Emergency medicine researchers are developing ways to use ice slurry, a high-fluidity ice particle mixture, to rapidly cool the blood and sustain the heart and brain cells following cardiac arrest.

People who suffer cardiac arrest outside the hospital have a lower chance of recovering, since brain cells start dying rapidly 10-12 minutes later because of a lack of blood flow to the brain. When cells are cooled, their metabolism and chemical processes slow dramatically. The researchers believe ice slurry could be injected into the body to induce faster, internal cooling. Because of its high cooling capacity, ice slurry could cool critical organs very rapidly with only a small amount of coolant.

In the procedure, the slurry would be inserted into the lungs, cooling the surrounding blood. Medics would need to perform chest compressions to circulate the cooled blood, allowing it to reach the brain and preserve cells. Data collected by the researchers show that ice slurry cools the brain by 2-5o C very quickly and appears to keep the brain cool for an hour. This would give medics and doctors more time to revive normal blood flow and reduce brain damage to little or none. The research is being conducted by investigators at the University of Chicago's Emergency Resuscitation Center (UC, IL, USA; www.uchicago.edu) and the US Argonne National Laboratory (at UC; www.anl.gov) under a US$4 million grant from the US National Institutes of Health.

"With the grant, we can further develop our tools, make even better slurry, and hopefully move closer to the point where it's possible to do human trials,” says Ken Kasza, a senior mechanical engineer who heads the research at Argonne.





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