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An American study into the potentially helpful effects of hypothermia treatment for children with a brain injury has shown that there is no therapeutic benefit to the treatment, and has suggested that there may, in fact, be an increased mortality rate associated with it.
Previous research has shown, in the words of the research paper, that "Hypothermia therapy improves survival and the neurologic outcome in animal models of traumatic brain injury. However, the effect of hypothermia therapy on the neurologic outcome and mortality among children who have severe traumatic brain injury is unknown."
In this research, 225 children around the world with severe traumatic brain injury were assigned randomly to either a hypothermia group or a normothermia group. The former were treated within 8 hours of their personal injury with cooling, in the hope that this could minimise ongoing brain trauma.
The results, however, showed that the rate of unfavourable outcomes was higher in the cooled group than the normal-temperature patients. There were also more deaths in the cooled group than the normothermic patients, but this difference was not sufficient to prove that the treatment was responsible.
A spokesperson from the Paediatric Intensive Care Society in the UK said, "There is far more interest in using cooling after cardiac arrest, in both adults and children, and in neonates starved of oxygen at birth, and there is far more evidence supporting these.
"I don't think anyone in this country would be routinely using it after head injury to the levels in this study."
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