Hypothermia News and Research

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When exposed to cold temperatures, your body begins to lose heat faster than it can be produced. Prolonged exposure to cold will eventually use up your body’s stored energy. The result is hypothermia, or abnormally low body temperature. Body temperature that is too low affects the brain, making the victim unable to think clearly or move well. This makes hypothermia particularly dangerous because a person may not know it is happening and won’t be able to do anything about it.

Hypothermia is most likely at very cold temperatures, but it can occur even at cool temperatures (above 40°F) if a person becomes chilled from rain, sweat, or submersion in cold water.

Homeless shelters grapple with COVID safety as cold creeps in

Ben Barnes has slept in abandoned buildings, hallways and alleys. For the past year or so, he's been staying at the city's largest homeless shelter, Pacific Garden Mission, in the shadows of the famous skyline.

16 Nov 2020

Study: Cold weather is responsible for almost all temperature-related deaths

With the number of extreme weather days rising around the globe in recent years due to global warming, it is no surprise that there has been an upward trend in hospital visits and admissions for injuries caused by high heat over the last several years.

18 Aug 2020

Early blood test could detect birth asphyxia

An early blood test could detect which babies deprived of oxygen at birth are at risk of serious neurodisabilities like cerebral palsy and epilepsy.

4 Aug 2020

Researchers report a key breakthrough to help protect newborns from brain damage

Oxygen deprivation can be the worst start to a newborn's life, resulting in brain damage, epilepsy, developmental delays and death.

23 Jun 2020

Remote continuous monitoring easily, effectively detects seizures in at-risk neonates

A team of researchers from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia has demonstrated how to easily and effectively monitor for seizures in newborn infants, catching more instances than typical methods and improving the quality of care for infants in hospitals that lack the on-site resources to detect these seizures.

22 Jun 2020

Neural circuits that control hibernation-like behaviors discovered in mice

The dream of suspended animation has long captivated the human imagination, reflected in countless works of mythology and fiction, from King Arthur and Sleeping Beauty to Captain America and Han Solo.

11 Jun 2020

UTHealth experts successfully treat 3-week-old infant with severe COVID-19

In one of the first reported cases of its kind, a 3-week-old infant in critical condition recovered from COVID-19 due to rapid recognition and treatment by physicians from McGovern Medical School at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston/

28 Apr 2020

Therapeutic hypothermia effectively targets brain injury sites

When a newborn suffers lack of oxygen before or during birth, doctors have very little time to save precious brain tissue.

20 Feb 2020

Braincool completes patient recruitment to study Cooral System for prevention of Oral Mucositis

BrainCool AB, a Swedish medical device innovator, and a world leader in medical cooling technology for therapeutic hypothermia (brain cooling) and oncology, is pleased to announce that it has completed patient recruitment in the Scandinavian multi-center pivotal trial of 180 patients to investigate the patented Cooral® System for prevention of Oral Mucositis, one of the most debilitating side-effects of both standard and high-dose chemotherapeutic oncology treatments.

11 Feb 2020

Combination of two immune defense strategies could afford alternative approach to treating sepsis

The human immune system uses two pre-programmed strategies to tackle infection. One is fever, a resistance mechanism that tries to eliminate a pathogen by raising the body's temperature.

23 Jan 2020

Study suggests average body temperature in humans falling

For decades, people have considered the average human body temperature to be 98.6 F, or 37 degrees Celsius. However, a new study published January 7, 2020, in the journal eLifeindicates this may no longer be the norm – and the researchers suggest a reason for their observed drop in average temperature.

13 Jan 2020

Minimally invasive technique to directly measure cardiac output in newborns

The amount of blood that the heart pumps in one minute (cardiac output) can be directly measured safely in newborns by monitoring changes in blood velocity after injecting saline, indicates a paper published online Dec. 17, 2019 in the Journal of Pediatrics and Neonatal Medicine.

8 Jan 2020

Suspended animation in humans successfully tried for the first time

Researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, for the first time have put a patient in “suspended animation” successfully. Using this method, they lowered the body temperature of the human patient for the first time. This would help surgeons to prolong the time of surgery to correct traumatic injuries. The plan of their feat was published in the latest issue of the New Scientist last week.

25 Nov 2019

Frailty: An important predictor of worse outcome after traumatic spinal cord injury

A new study has shown that frailty is an important predictor of worse outcome after traumatic spinal cord injury in patients less than 75 years of age. In patients younger than 75 years, frailty was a predictor of adverse events, acute length of stay, and in-hospital mortality, as reported in an article published in Journal of Neurotrauma, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.

21 Nov 2019

Risk factors of malignant arrhythmias found in patients treated with therapeutic hyperthermia after cardiac arrest

Researchers showed that 20-50% of patients developed an irregular heartbeat that required defibrillation during the active cooling phase of therapeutic hypothermia following an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

5 Nov 2019

Sanford Burnham Prebys scientist receives $3.58 million to advance treatment for opioid-use disorders

The National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, awarded a $3.58 million grant to Sanford Burnham Prebys scientist Anthony Pinkerton, Ph.D., to advance a potential treatment for opioid-use disorders, called SBI-553.

23 Oct 2019

Major global health initiative could save hundreds of thousands of babies in Africa

Hundreds of thousands of babies could be saved through a major global health initiative launched here today to improve newborn hospital care throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

4 Oct 2019

Clinical trial explores effect of whole-body cooling in comatose patients after cardiac arrest

While body temperature cooling is not a new treatment tactic for patients who experience cardiac arrest, a new clinical trial hopes to better understand the optimal amount of time for targeted temperature management.

4 Oct 2019

Starving seniors: How America fails to feed its aging

Army veteran Eugene Milligan is 75 years old and blind. He uses a wheelchair since losing half his right leg to diabetes and gets dialysis for kidney failure.

3 Sep 2019

Experts release scientific statement on predicting survival for cardiac arrest survivors

If a loved one has a heart attack that stops the heart, ends up in a coma, and the treating physician approaches you about taking the person off life support, would you trust that the physician knows when to make the call or how to judge that the person won’t recover? It turns out that the science is rather shaky on when to decide the likelihood of recovery from a coma after the heart stops.

From Johns Hopkins Medicine 12 Jul 2019