First trial of suspended animation on humans set to start this month

The world's first attempts at placing humans in suspended animation using a new technique will take place this month at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The technique will initially be used on 10 patients whose wounds would otherwise be lethal in an attempt to buy the surgeons some time, CNet reported.

It works, as suggested by science fiction, by cooling the body-but not by applying an external temperature change.

Instead, a team of surgeons will remove all of the patient's blood, replacing it with a cold saline solution.

This will cool the body, slowing its functions to a halt and reducing the need for oxygen.

"We are suspending life, but we don't like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction," Doctor Samuel Tisherman, the surgeon who will lead the trial, told New Scientist.

"So we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation," he said.

The technique was developed by Doctor Peter Rhee, who successfully managed to test it on pigs in the year 2000. In 2006, Dr Rhee and his colleagues published the results of their subsequent research.

After inducing fatal wounds in the pigs by cutting their arteries with scalpels, the team replaced the pigs' blood with saline, which lowered their body temperature to 10 degrees Celsius.

All of the control pigs, whose body temperature was left alone, died. The pigs who were warmed back up at a medium speed demonstrated a 90 percent survival rate, although some of their hearts had to be given a jump start (the pigs that were warmed up slow and fast had a 50 and 30 percent survival rate respectively). Afterwards, the pigs demonstrated no physical or cognitive impairment.

The technique, therefore, will only be used as an emergency measure on patients who have suffered cardiac arrest after severe traumatic injury, with their chest cavity open and having lost at least half their blood already-injuries that see only a seven percent survival rate.

The survival rate of these patients will then be measured against a control group that has not received the treatment before further testing can begin.