We’ll soon be able to bring dead back to life, says heart specialist

Medical advances mean it will soon be possible
to bring the dead back to life, a doctor claims.
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 aged 51 in Rome
last month – 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.’