Patients suffering from cardiac arrest or brain injury have a new chance at full recovery thanks to a machine recently made more widely available at the University Medical Center.
The University Hospital is the only medical center in Central Virginia using the Alsius CoolGard 3000, a device that allows doctors to control a patient's body temperature to prevent possible further brain damage, said Mark Adams, a registered nurse in the coronary care unit.
The hospital's four new CoolGards could mean the difference between suffering extensive brain damage and walking out of the hospital fully recovered, Adams said. The machines can be used on patients who have been resuscitated from cardiac arrest, Adams said, as well as those patients suffering from traumatic brain injury.
The process of cooling down patients resuscitated from cardiac arrest and brain damage in order to prevent fever has been common practice for years, Adams said. This induced hypothermia ensures less risk of traumatic brain damage resulting from fever, said Michele Maddox, a registered nurse in the neurological intensive care unit.
Until recently, doctors have been conducting cooling procedures externally, packing the patient's body with ice packs or draping the patient with fluid-filled blankets, Adams said. These external methods are inefficient because the cooling tends to be very erratic, he said, and the patient's body often reacts by shutting down. External cooling also makes it more difficult to prevent the patient's temperature from dropping too low. CoolGard's method is "much more precise [and] controlled," Adams said. "It's really state of the art."
CoolGard's innovative process is much faster and more efficient than external methods, Adams said, because the new machine drops a patient's body temperature internally and maintains it at a steady level.
"This will greatly improve quality of life for patients who survive cardiac arrest," Adams said. "So many patients that we resuscitate, or get their heart restarted, have in the past suffered irreversible brain damage. Since we've been cooling people, even externally, we've had some remarkable outcomes."
The machine, which works by inserting a catheter filled with an ice-cold saline solution into a patient's vein, has been in use in the Neurological Intensive Care Unit since 2004, Maddox said, and it only recently has been instituted in the Coronary Care and Medical Intensive Care units. The hospital has about 100 to 120 employees trained to use the machines with more expected to be trained, Adams said, and the machines are available for immediate use.
"It's exciting to have this kind of technology," Maddox said. "We've used it on one population here since 2004, and it's even more exciting to be moving forward to other units of the hospital"
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