No, this is not a post about the afterlife. Rather, I want to talk about what happens when your body dies. Hospitals generally call the time of death after a person cannot be resuciated and their heart stops beating. But the brain can function for a number of minutes after the heart stops. The person is not likely concious during this time, but are they still alive?
I've honestly been thinking about this all semester, thanks to my physiology class. I started thinking about ways in which people committ suicide: overdose of drugs, bullet to the heart or brain, etc. And it made me wonder if the person really dies when their heart stops. Obviously people are still considered alive even if their higher brain is not functioning (braindead individuals), but the brain is what makes us humans.
You may be wondering why I'm going on about this now. Well, being the science geek that I am, I came across an article that discusses this very concept. Scientists have found that the cells in the body do not die from lack of oxygen. Meaning, when the heart stops and 5 minutes pass, the cells are all still alive, even when the person is declared dead. Pretty serious discovery, hmm?
What's more is that it turns out the cells die (via a preprogramed mechanism) when they are reintroduced to oxygen (after 5 minutes without). So it's not the lack of oxygen after a heart attack that kills someone. It's the resucitation afterwards. Which basically means that the protocol in the ER for treating people who code is pretty much killing them:
When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he's lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? "We give them oxygen," Becker says. "We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it's taking up more oxygen." Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death.
According to the article, a study done to slowly reintroduce oxygen has an 80% success rate, compared to only a 15% success rate over traditional resucitation practices. This, of course, has huge implications, and could result in saving huge numbers of lives, especially with cardiovasular disease being high on the list for causes of death here in the US. Who knows what further research into this area could demonstrate.
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