Brain cooling might be harmful for head injury patients: study

Head injury patients do not benefit from a therapy that involves cooling their bodies to reduce brain swelling, researchers said Wednesday.

Instead, the therapy may increase patients' risk of death and disability and should not be used to treat traumatic brain injuries, they reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Lowering body temperature -- a therapy known as induced hypothermia -- is widely used in some intensive care units in Europe and North America, but there have been few clinical trials to assess the effects on patients' long-term recovery.

The new study, led by the University of Edinburgh in Britain, tracked the outcomes of almost 400 cases of traumatic brain injuries from 18 different countries.

Around half of the patients were treated with standard procedures. The other half were treated with induced hypothermia to try to protect the brain from further damage caused by swelling.

The team found that induced hypothermia was successful at reducing the build-up of pressure in the skull after head injury. Six months later, however, patients who had received the therapy were more likely to fare worse than those treated with standard care.

Favorable outcomes, ranging from moderate disability to good recovery, occurred in only a quarter of the patients in the hypothermia group compared with more than a third of patients in the control group.

Doctors ended the trial early because of fears that the therapy may cause harm to some patients.

"This well conducted trial has shown that hypothermia can successfully reduce brain pressure following trauma, but after 6 months functional recovery was significantly worse than standard care alone," study author Professor Peter Andrews, head of critical care medicine at the University of Edinburgh, said in a statement.

The team presented the findings Wednesday at the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine Annual Congress in Berlin, Germany. They will also discuss the results of the trial at the Neurocritical Care Society annual meeting in the U.S. Friday.

Induced hypothermia involves cooling the body between two and five degrees below normal body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius.

Patients are given ice cold intravenous drips within 10 days of their accident. They are kept cool using either cold water blankets or cooling pads for at least 48 hours, after which they are gradually re-warmed to normal body temperature. Endit