The Resuscitationist - January 12, 2016 - By Jason Bowman
"The reception I got from sharing my last batch of research data was much more than I anticipated. Thank you for reading! So in the spirit of my previous post I’m going to talk a little today about another project Matt and I have worked on that’s in the process of publication now. I obviously can’t share the whole paper or they wouldn’t let me publish it, but interestingly enough I can actually share some cool things that won’t make it into the publication like this video I took at the bottom of this post. To give a little background, this was a rat study we did about a year ago in conjunction with the Texas A&M Department of Molecular Cardiology and related to the toxicity of epinephrine and the phenomena of reperfusion injury.
Common medical knowledge says that the brain can’t survive more than 4-6 mins of no flow arrest. And pretty much anything that’s common medical knowledge is wrong, this 4-6 minute rule is no exception. If you doubt me just look at Dr Lurie’s pig studies. His pigs can easily survive a 15 minute arrest with an intact CPC score if you give good CPR, sodium nitroprusside, adenosine and use stutter CPR to induce post ischemic conditioning. Comparatively the pigs getting ACLS but just as good of CPR had awful CPC scores. We had seen this research and realized its implications, the question remaining though was: why is there such a difference? Is it just physiology? While the data in my lab shows there is definitely an improvement in flow when using vasodilators we felt (purely gestalt) that there must be another component, that flow didn’t account for all the differences and that maybe, just maybe, ACLS is toxic to ischemic cells? Spoiler alert: it is"