By Lisa Collier Cool | Posted December 14 2010
Christine Newport was waiting to pick up her daughter after school, when she suddenly felt cold, clammy and nauseated. So ill that she could hardly walk, the Cranford, New Jersey mom of three knocked on the window of another mother’s car and asked her to get the school nurse. Then 41, she’d suffered a heart attack.
Newport was raced by ambulance to Overlook Hospital in Summit on that January day in 2008. “She went into cardiac arrest, had seizures and turned deep blue like a grape because she was having difficulty getting oxygen into her lungs,” says Barry Cohen, MD, medical director of the cardiac catheterization laboratory at Gagnon Cardiovascular Institute at Morristown Memorial Hospital. After five hours of treatment—including placing stents in the blocked arteries—Newport was still having seizures, adds Dr. Cohen. “We knew her brain was in jeopardy due to severe lack of oxygen.”
To save her life–and brain–Dr. Cohen transferred her to Morristown Memorial Hospital, where she was first person in New Jersey to be treated with a new technology: the Arctic Sun Temperature Management System “cold suit.” It’s used to cool the body to 91 degrees, a treatment known as therapeutic hypothermia, explains Dr. Cohen. “It puts brain cells into suspended animation so that they can survive longer without oxygen, reducing the risk of irreversible brain damage.”
Without this treatment, adds Dr. Cohen, “cardiac arrest that occurs outside of a hospital, as in Christine’s case, is associated with very poor outcomes. A patient might have a 25 to 33 percent chance—at best—of cognitive return with mild or no impairment. By giving hypothermia, we slow everything down to give the brain time to recover, which doubles the rate of cognitive return to the 50 percent range. It’s a very safe, non-invasive therapy that has dramatically improved care after cardiac arrest.”
The Arctic Sun system has three main components. Thin insulated gel pads are wrapped around the patient’s thighs and trunk, then filled with water through tubes attached to a monitoring device that precisely regulates the water temperature. Before being strapped into the cold suit, Newport was heavily sedated to prevent shivering. After 24 hours of hypothermia, her body was slowly warmed over the next 12 hours to the normal 98.6 degrees.
“When I woke up, I initially had some memory loss,” says Newport. “I knew I had kids, but I thought I was 31 instead of 41.” Her memories soon returned, except that she still doesn’t recall much about the heart attack. Other than that, the now 44-year-old mom has made a full recovery, with no brain or heart damage. “I’m extremely lucky to be here.”
CONNECT THE DOTS
To learn more about the Arctic Sun Temperature Management System, visit the manufacturer’s website. A recent study reports that therapeutic hypothermia can improve survival and neurological outcome after cardiac arrest, especially if started with the first six hours. Also check out How Ice Can Save Your Life in the Wall Street Journal.
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