Thermal Suit Helps Treat Heart Attacks

A new device is being used to investigate rapid hypothermia treatment in combination with primary angioplasty to treat heart attacks.

The ThermoSuit non-invasive cooling system uses an inflatable body suit that allows rapidly circulating ice water to come in direct contact with the skin, reducing the patient's core temperature to 34 ºC in less than 20 minutes. An intuitive and easy to use interface controls the circulation pump, and displays system status and the progress of the cooling process, with a default target core temperature of 33 ºC. The ThermoSuit System, a product of Life Recovery Systems (Kinnelon, NJ, USA), has received an Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Following the IDE, a new study is planned to examine if early and rapid cooling before reperfusion therapy with primary angioplasty may potentially reduce infarct-size post reperfusion, based on previous clinical data from a study held in 2003. That study included a subset of patients with anterior myocardial infarctions (MIs) whose temperature at the time of reperfusion was below 35 ºC, who had a significantly smaller infarction than the control group (9.3% of the left ventricular mass in the cooled population vs. 18.2% in controls). The new study will enroll up to twenty patients at two institutions who present within six hours of symptom onset and require percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) to restore blood flow to the heart. Cooling will be performed with the ThermoSuit in the emergency room within 60 minutes of arrival and cooling time is to be less than 30 minutes, without exceeding the AHA/ACC guidelines for door-to-balloon time (currently 90 minutes). The first institution to participate in the study will be the Ochsner Health System (New Orleans, LA, USA).

"We believe our rapid non-invasive cooling system has the ability to cool Acute MI patients to target temperature rapidly in the emergency room in preparation for PCI reperfusion therapy,” said John DiLiddo, vice president of marketing and sales at Life Recovery Systems.


Related Links:
Life Recovery Systems
Ochsner Health System