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The Living Dead

By Andrew Onariase
1 Oct 2010

Three days ago, I went on my university’s twitter page and saw that a lecturer (Prof Mike Tipton) featured on a BBC program “Back from the dead”, presented by Dr Kevin Fong, a consultant anaesthetist from UCL. This program caught my eye as I have always been interested in medical mysteries and weird medical phenomena.

Before I watched this programme, I wondered how one could be brought back from the dead; initially I thought it was about “the Lazarus effect”, as I have previously read about this. What seemed to amaze me was that a woman was trapped under ice for nearly two hours, her heart stopped beating, she was theoretically dead until she was airlifted to the hospital, where she came back to life. In the Program, the doctors even seem confused at how she came back to life; they think the cold might have saved her life.

This Program also brought back memories from my first year at Uni, where we were taught about freezing organs to halt their metabolic processes, could this have happened to this woman? Could the ice have frozen this woman’s heart for 2 hours to prevent any metabolic cell processes, stopped it beating and then started beating when she was brought back to normal body temperature?

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Sat, 02/10/2010 - 20:54 – Rachel Airley

Freezing organs

What you might also remember from uni were your pharmacology practicals.  Did you ever do experiments on cardiac muscle tissue?  If the heart is fresh and kept on ice it can be stimulated by electrical pulses.  If it's fresh enough it will still beat quite spontaneously when it is placed in isotonic solution at 37C.  This isn't strictly about metabolism but more about the ability of cardiac myosites to contract myogenically, i.e. generate a contraction without nerves.  Where the decreased metabolic rate comes in is the preservation of the woman's brain, where she recovered her cognitive function afterwards.  This occured as with such a slow metabolic rate, the oxygen needed by the cells in the brain for respiration is much lower.  Therefore when the heart stopped along with the blood supply to the brain, the decreased oxygen delivery to the brain in those 3 hours under the ice was not enough to cause brain cell death.  Really interesting programme!
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Sun, 03/10/2010 - 14:39 – Andrew Onariase

Pharmacology Practicals

Thanks for your contribution Dr Rachel Airley. I remember carrying out pharmacological experiments in my second year at uni, it was interesting, i watched in amazement how the mammalian heart contracted myogenically in response to various chemicals.

The program showed how science redefines the meaning of death, it was really fascinating to watch.

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