Positivity: Heart attack victim a cool customer (benefitting from a cool treatment)

From Massachusetts:

Monday, July 23, 2007 - Updated: 01:11 AM EST

For 18 minutes one cold, predawn morning in February, Claire Simmons’ heart quit beating. No oxygen was feeding her brain and by most accounts, the 71-year-old grandmother shouldn’t have made it.

But she did.

“She was one of our miracles,” said Colleen Snydeman, nursing director in the cardiac intensive care unit at Massachusetts General Hospital where Simmons underwent an emerging treatment that saves brain cells after a heart attack by inducing hypothermia.

Hypothermia was endorsed by the American Heart Association in 2005, but cooling is still not widely practiced and it could be saving thousands of lives, she said.
“Some hospitals don’t understand this is a therapy that could be an option,” she said. “It gives people the possibility of recovery.”

Simmons was one of 12 cardiac patients cooled in 2006 at MGH, one of several Boston hospitals that use it. It must be done within six hours of the heart attack.

Hypothermia lowers the body’s metabolism, reducing the brain’s need for oxygen, said Robert Kline, CEO of Colorado company Medivance, maker of Arctic Sun, a device that uses pads and chilled water to cool. Hypothermia also halts the cascade effect that starts when oxygen-starved cells die.

“When we’re cooling we’re not trying to salvage the heart, we’re trying to salvage the brain,” he said.

There are 150 U.S. hospitals using Arctic Sun, up from 40 in 2005 and 7,000 patients have been cooled, up from 500 in 2004.

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