Baby frozen to correct brain damage at birth makes full recovery

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDMar 3 2011

Baby Ella was born starved of oxygen but doctors cooled her body for three days to reduce brain damage. She made a complete recovery. After birth Ella was wrapped in a special blanket filled with fluid which cooled her whole body down from the normal 37°c to 33.5°c by doctors at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge.

She was born at Peterborough Maternity Unit after a traumatic labor in which Rachel Claxton, Ella’s mother, is thought to have suffered a ruptured placenta. This restricted the baby’s oxygen and blood supply and caused her to suffer from HIE (hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy), which can lead to severe brain damage. In Ella’s case, no heartbeat could be detected at birth, so doctors resuscitated her and gave her life support for more than 20 minutes to help her to breathe. They then started to cool her to reduce the swelling around her brain, before the decision was made to transfer her to Addenbrooke’s Hospital 30 miles away to continue her cooling treatment. Now Ella is a healthy nine-month-old with no sign of brain abnormalities.

According to the consultant neonatologist Dr Topun Austin, “We had always thought that there is not much you can do after brain damage, but a recent study showed that brain cells took 24 to 48 hours to die so there is a window during which brain damage can be stopped… Lack of oxygen is a trigger but it doesn’t not happen immediately. The damage can be prevented.” Usually babies who suffer this type of brain injury develop anything from a mild to a severe disability. “These are very sick babies. The key is to identify and treat them as early as possible - and start cooling them as soon as possible…It’s a relatively simple thing to do and should be done routinely,” Dr Austin said.

Professor Donald Peebles, spokesperson for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and a consultant obstetrician at University College London Hospital, said inducing hypothermia in oxygen-starved babies was fairly routine. “It’s not a perfect treatment, but as long as you get in there quickly research shows that one in eight given this cooling treatment will not have any brain damage.” However many experts say that it is not possible to know how effective the treatment has been until the babies are much older. Ella will have to be monitored at least for the first few years of life. She still needs physiotherapy but scans have shown no abnormalities on her brain.