Advances in biology and medicine confront us with many paradoxes, never as now has man had such a high life expectancy, but at the same time, the concept of death has never been more relativized than now, nor do scientists agree to define it. That.
Modern procedures to artificially prolong life are numerous and have always led to heated ethical debates about how to use them (and whether we should use them), but also cases of people who die clinically and then?Resurrect? Or reactivate all your bodily functions without suffering bodily harm.
What’s going on?
Until a few decades ago, there was consensus that a person who had blood flow interrupted was declared clinically dead; cell death was known to take longer, but after 20 minutes without vital signs, the person was officially pronounced dead.
The 20-minute pause was an almost absolute truth, it was considered that if you had a heart attack and the brain stopped receiving oxygen during that time, death was imminent, but now things have changed. Cases began to emerge in which some people spent more than four hours with their hearts beating and yet “income for life?” With the brain intact.
At first it was an exception and the cases were counted with the fingers, over time new records have been recorded in different parts of the world, at the moment there are no accurate statistics, but we know that it is a fact that occurs in less than 1% of cases.
The million-dollar question is: How reliable can these numbers be?A lot of people died? Just because they spent time without their vital signs?These are not low-value issues, and even science clearly defines the limit that marks the transition of life. to the death.
Until now, the discussion is mainly conducted in cases where death is the result of defects in the brain and heart, so the first conclusion may be that a heart attack is not synonymous with death and that these cases must be carefully evaluated to know whether there was actually a death or not.
Professor Sam Parnia, director of resuscitation research at Stony Brook University in New York, said he knew cases where people had spent up to five hours clinically dead and then came back to life in completely normal conditions. It also emphasizes that technical resuscitations must be applied correctly for the body to return to normal.
Parnia believes that after the heart below, the brain enters a process that can be called “hibernation”. It is as if he were protected from death and, to carry out this activity, reduced his actions to the maximum, waiting for better conditions to be reactivated.
In his book “The Lazarus Effect”, the professor states that the reactivation of the brain is a dangerous moment and requires good management. The professor successfully applied a method to lower patients’ temperature so that the brain performs its process slowly and does not collapse in an attempt. get back to work.
Death probably isn’t what it used to be, and science is working to give us a new definition.
Image courtesy of natalia_maroz