Scientists in China have performed an amazing feat worthy of Victor Frankenstein: they revived a pig’s brain in 50 minutes after it stopped circulating completely. This eerie achievement may someday lead to progress in keeping the human brain intact and healthy for a longer time during resuscitation.
Today, we can often bring people back to life after a cardiac arrest, but after just a few minutes of lack of blood flow, vital organs such as the brain are damaged beyond repair. This means that doctors have only a short amount of time to bring a person back to life, preventing at least serious neurological complications. In a new study published last month in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, scientists sought to increase this time.
Previous studies have shown that liver function plays a key role in how well the rest of the body copes with cardiac arrest. For example, people with pre-existing liver disease have a higher risk of dying from cardiac arrest. Therefore, researchers working primarily at Sun Yat-sen University decided to test whether keeping the livers of Tibetan mini-pigs functionally alive could have a positive effect on the survival of their brains after resuscitation.
All of the pigs had their blood supply to the brain stopped, but some of them were connected to a life support system that kept blood circulating in the liver. The scientists then tried to revive the pigs’ brains after a certain period of time using the same life support system. After that, the pigs were euthanized and compared with a control group of pigs whose blood circulation was left unchanged.
The researchers found that the brains of the pigs that had the blood supply to both organs cut off were significantly more damaged after resuscitation. But the brains of the pigs that had their livers supported looked much better, with fewer signs of damage and a recovery of electrical activity that lasted up to six hours. The researchers were also able to restore brain activity in these pigs 50 minutes after the blood supply to the brain was cut off.
The study emphasizes the crucial role of the liver in the pathogenesis of brain injury after cardiac arrest
Of course, this doesn’t mean that scientists can now bring someone back from the dead completely unharmed by just strengthening their liver a little. There are many harmful bodily changes that occur shortly after cardiac arrest, not just in the brain and liver. And, of course, more research will need to be done to confirm the team’s findings that the liver is crucial to restoring brain function. But if this work continues to pay off, it could someday lead to practical interventions that increase the chances of successful resuscitation in humans.
“Knowledge gained from current and future studies has the potential to increase survival and improve outcomes for patients experiencing [cardiac arrest],” the researchers write.
