Source: IT House
Thanks to IT Home netizen Xiaoxing_14 for the clue delivery!
IT Home reported on October 19 that brain injury is the leading cause of death in cardiac arrest (CA) patients. Clinical studies have shown that the presence of postoperative hypoxic hepatitis or preoperative liver disease is associated with increased mortality and poor neurological recovery. Previous studies have suggested that the brain can tolerate ischemic injury for only 5 to 8 minutes, resulting in a very low success rate in cardiac arrest.
According to Xinhua News Agency, experts from the Organ Transplant Center of the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University and an international team successfully "resurrected" a "dead" pig brain that had been "dead" for 50 minutes using the world's first "ex vivo brain care technology".
IT House found that the relevant results had actually been published in the international journal "European Molecular Biology Organization Molecular Medicine" in the form of a cover article on September 19, but the purpose of the researchers' research was not to "resurrect the pig brain", and this achievement was only incidental to the experimental process.
According to the researchers, they observed a whole-brain cerebral ischemia model in vivo and found that reperfusion brains with hepatic ischemia had larger infarct sizes, higher tissue damage scores, and increased intravascular CD45+ cell adhesion compared to brains without concomitant hepatic ischemia.
In an in vitro model of room temperature machine perfusion (NMP), the addition of a functioning liver to the brain NMP circulation significantly reduced postoperative brain injury, increased neuronal activity, and improved brain electrical activity. In addition, significant changes were observed in both the transcriptome and metabolome with or without hepatic ischemia.
This study highlights the critical role of the liver in the pathogenesis of postoperative brain injury. This provides important clues for the development of new treatments that can target both the liver and the brain to improve patient outcomes after cardiac arrest.
The researchers used pigs as experimental subjects, first stopping their hearts and then separating their brains from their bodies. After 50 minutes, the researchers intubated the isolated brain with an extracorporeal life support device to form a living system that supports brain resuscitation.
The results showed that the pig's brain was successfully "revived" and was able to restore brain function and maintain vitality for a certain period of time. The research team voluntarily terminated the experiment after 6 hours.
This set of equipment adopts the "ex vivo brain maintenance technology" independently developed by the team, which not only contains artificial heart and artificial lung parts, but also uses blood perfusion technology at room temperature to maintain a live pig liver, providing fresh, aerobic and metabolically stable blood circulation for the isolated pig brain connected to the device.
Studies have shown that with the support of the cardiopulmonary resuscitation system alone, the edema of the isolated brain is obvious, the activity of nerve cells is significantly reduced, and the electrophysiological activity of the brain gradually disappears. With the support of the cardiopulmonary and hepatic complex life system in vitro, the edema of the isolated brain is significantly reduced, the viability of nerve cells and the microstructure of cells are significantly improved, and the electrical activity of the brain can be restored and maintained.
He Xiaoshun, director of the Organ Transplantation Center of the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, said that the research results provide a new strategy for cardiac arrest rescue, and are expected to improve the success rate of cardiac arrest patients in the future, and provide a new platform for brain science research.
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