The dream:we will soon bring back the dead back to life -heart specialist

Modern techniques will enable a patient to be revived
up to 24 hours after they stop breathing, Dr Sam
Parnia says.
The American critical care physician, who trained in
London, said: ‘We may soon be rescuing people from
death’s clutches hours, or even longer, after they have
actually died.’
He claims the US actor James Gandolfini, star of The
Sopranos – who died in June aged 51 in Rome –
might have survived if he had suffered his massive
heart attack in New York.
‘I believe if he died here, he could still be alive. We’d
cool him down, pump oxygen to the tissues, which
prevents them from dying,’ Dr Parnia told Germany’s
Der Spiegel magazine. ‘Clinically dead, he could then
be cared for by the cardiologist. He would make an
angiogram, find the clot, take it out, put in a stent
and we would restart the heart.’
Dr Parnia, whose new book on resuscitation science is
called Erasing Death, said death should be reversible
for many patients, providing they are in the right
place getting the right treatment.
‘Of course we can’t rescue everybody and many
people with heart attacks have other major problems,’
he said. ‘But if all the latest medical technologies and
training had been implemented, which clearly hasn’t
been done, then in principle the only people who
should die and stay dead are those that have an
underlying condition that is untreatable.
‘A heart attack is treatable. Blood loss as well. A
terminal cancer isn’t, neither are many infections with
multiresistant pathogens. In these cases, even if we’d
restart the heart, it would stop again and again.
‘My basic message: The death we commonly perceive
today in 2013 is a death that can be reversed.’ Dr
Parnia, head of intensive care at the Stony Brook
University Hospital in New York, said resuscitation
figures tell their own story.
The average resuscitation rate for cardiac arrest
patients is 18 per cent in US hospitals and 16 per cent
in Britain. But at his hospital it is 33 per cent – and
the rate peaked at 38 per cent earlier this year.
‘Most, but not all of our patients, get discharged with
no neurological damage whatsoever,’ he said, adding
that it is a ‘widely held misconception’ – even among
doctors – that the brain begins to suffer massive
damage from oxygen deprivation three to five
minutes after the heart stops.
‘In the past decade we have seen tremendous
progress. With today’s medicine, we can bring people
back to life up to one, maybe two hours, sometimes
even longer, after their heart stopped beating and
they have thus died by circulatory failure.
‘In the future, we will likely get better at reversing
death.’
The techniques he advocates are not cryogenics –
freezing the body immediately after death – but
cooling it down to best preserve brain cells while
keeping up the level of oxygen in the blood. This buys
time to fix the underlying problem and restart the
heart, he claims.
He says that if someone collapses with a heart attack,
call 999 then immediately place bags of frozen
vegetables on them until the ambulance arrives, as it
helps protect the brain.
‘It is possible that in 20 years, we may be able to
restore people to life 12 hours or maybe even 24
hours after they have died.
‘You could call that resurrection, if you will. But I still
call it resuscitation science.’