Yesterday, 快猫短视频 broke the news that suspended animation has been tried on humans for the first time. The idea is to buy doctors more time to operate on people who would otherwise die from their injuries. To do this, at least one person who had a traumatic injury and entered cardiac arrest was cooled to around 10掳C and their blood replaced by saline. This halts activity across the body and gives medics two crucial hours, where they would normally have minutes, to see what can be done to save them.
快猫短视频鈥檚 Helen Thomson answered your questions on this new procedure:
Isn鈥檛 suspended animation a bit like an induced coma?
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Yes, there are similarities between the two. A medically induced coma uses drugs to slow the metabolism of the brain (so it needs less oxygen) to help reduce swelling and aid its recovery. However, suspended animation goes a lot further by lowering people鈥檚 body temperature to almost completely stop metabolism in the body and brain.
Induced coma is commonly used for brain injury, whereas suspended animation is being trialled in people who have had a cardiac arrest after a traumatic wound and whose injuries can be fixed with enough time.
Do people get to choose whether they are put into suspended animation?
The technique is only used as a last resort, meaning the team at the University of Maryland School of Medicine will have done everything they can to save the person鈥檚 life the regular way first. Patients who experience a cardiac arrest from traumatic haemorrhage are unlikely to survive with current treatments.
In order to get approval for the trial, the team had to have several consultations with the public. They also put details of the trial in the local newspapers, pointing people to a website where they can opt out. More details on the approval process can be found .
Would this procedure only be available to the rich or famous?
No, it doesn鈥檛 distinguish between rich and poor. There are several conditions for being a participant, not least that you need to have had a cardiac arrest due to trauma and have been brought to the correct hospital. The technique involves a lot of doctors who all have to be present and available at the right time.
What about mental health? Could it be used to treat depression or anxiety too?
I鈥檓 not sure how it could be used in mental health, but the hope is that it might be used in other medical areas. Its usefulness will come down to a lot of things: how effective it is, and how easy it is to implement in other hospitals, for instance. The dream scenario is that you would be able to keep people in this state for months or years while they await a cure for their disease. But this is a distant dream 鈥� this trial is just the first step and we don鈥檛 know yet whether it is effective.
So is immortality the endgame of all this?
The endgame is about saving the life of someone who would almost certainly have died. You might liken it to the invention of the defibrillator 鈥� before that happened, many people with a cardiac arrest would have died. Now some of them live as a result of that technology.
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These questions were provided by 快猫短视频 readers on Twitter and Facebook. The full Twitter Q&A with Helen Thomson .
