New Design for Combat Tourniquet

A new tourniquet has been developed to replace the traditional cravat-and-stick tourniquet and the strap-and-buckle tourniquet that date back to the American Civil War.

The combat application tourniquet (CAT), manufactured by Phil Durango (Golden, CO, USA), is a one-handed tourniquet that completely occludes arterial and venous blood flow of an extremity in the event of a traumatic wound with significant hemorrhage. The tourniquet uses a self-adhering band and a friction adaptor buckle to fit a wide range of extremities, combined with a one-handed windlass system with a free moving internal band to provide true circumferential pressure to the extremity. Once the band is tightened and the bleeding has stopped, the windlass is locked in place. A Velcro strap is then applied for further securing of the windlass during casualty evacuation.

The CAT was tested along with eight other tourniquets in 2004 at the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research (USAISR, San Antonio, TX, USA). The evaluation was prompted because many deploying soldiers and units were purchasing tourniquets on the Internet, but the tourniquets' effectiveness had not been determined. Once testing was complete, the institute's researchers recommended the CAT tourniquet as the first choice for issue to every soldier.

Tourniquets are being used on almost every extremity injury, and they are saving lives, said Colonel John B. Holcomb, a trauma consultant for the U.S. Surgeon General and commander of the USAISR, who was recently deployed as a surgeon at the 10th Combat Support Hospital in Iraq. Tourniquets were rarely seen early in the war, and now it's abnormal to see a severe extremity injury without a functional tourniquet in place. There is no pre-hospital device deployed in this war that has saved more lives than tourniquets.



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Phil Durango
U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research