Press Releases

A large-scale, multicenter study has shown that emergency body cooling does not improve survival rates or reduce brain injury in infants and children with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest more than normal temperature control.

Therapeutic hypothermia, or whole body cooling, can improve survival and health outcomes for adults after cardiac arrest and also for newborns with brain injury due to a lack of oxygen at birth.  But, until now, this treatment has not been studied in infants or children admitted to hospitals with cardiac arrest.

A National Institutes of Health-funded study found no statistical difference in the primary clinical measure—which assessed changes in function of six organs from before to seven days after surgery—between complex cardiac surgery patients receiving transfusions of red blood cell units stored for short (up to 10 days) versus long (21 or more days) periods. These findings indicate there is no need to alter how hospitals currently transfuse blood in adults going through complex cardiac surgical procedures.

WHAT: National Institutes of Health-funded researchers have determined that a widely used surgical technique for correcting abnormal heart rhythm is effective, but increases the likelihood that patients will later need permanent pacemakers. The study included 260 patients with atrial fibrillation, the most common type of irregular heart rhythm, who each had mitral-valve surgery at one of 20 research centers in the United States and Canada.

WHAT: NHLBI-funded researchers have discovered a novel means by which viruses spread between cells: multiple polioviruses, a type of enterovirus, travel together within a membrane-enclosed sac, arriving together at a cell they then infect. This finding revises a central tenet of virology that viruses behave as independent infectious agents.