Study of Systemic Cooling in Acute Spinal Cord Injury

This is an important subject because of the severity of cervical spinal cord injury, the paucity of methods for mitigating it, and the lack of information about the efficacy of hypothermia. During the early 1970s, localized cooling of the spinal cord during spinal surgery after traumatic cord injury was performed in several centers. However, the study designs, lack of controls, small numbers of patients, confounding factors and limited outcome measures did not allow conclusions to be drawn about any beneficial effect. Since then, techniques for systemic hypothermia have been refined and applied to patients with head injury, stroke and cardiac arrest. A recent Cochrane review¹ concluded that it may be effective in reducing death and unfavorable outcomes in patients with head injury, but significant benefit was only found in low quality trials; it also concluded that hypothermia may increase the...