Pediatric patients with out-of hospital cardiac arrest: Is therapeutic hypothermia for them?

摘要

Children with hypoxic-isch-emic brain injury constitute a significant portion of the patient populations seen in most pediatric intensive care units. Unfortunately, the ability of a pediatric intensiv-ist to meaningfully intervene in helping improve neurologic outcomes in children who have sustained hypoxic-ischemic injury has not improved over the past sev-eral decades (1, 2).There is a new therapy on the horizon, however, that has the potential to improve the lives of these unfortunate children, therapeutic hypothermia. In 2002, the Hypothermia After Cardiac Arrest Study Group published their findings that adult patients who sustained a cardiac arrest resulting from ventricular arrhythmia and who were made hypother-mic to 32-34degC for 24-48 hrs had decreased mortality and improved neurologic outcomes as compared with those patients treated conventionally (3).