An innovative new therapy is being used to fight birth injuries by cooling the baby’s body. It has been discovered that if a newborn’s body temperature is lowered to about 6 degrees below normal within six hours that it could decrease the damage done to the brain from birth injuries. The idea is that the low temperature causes the body to slip into whole body hypothermia.
There have been many cases over the years when the protective benefits of cold temperatures for the brain have been noted. For example young children who have drowned in icy lakes and been resuscitated have recovered with little or no brain damage.
Research has been done in the United States which has shown that cooling provides benefits to infants who were born deprived of oxygen. Babies whose body temperature was lowered to 92.3degrees within 6 hours and kept there for 72 hours have been proven to be less likely to die and have shown less risk of severe brain injury.
There have been some issues determining the best way to cool the baby, one system has been developed that uses a water filled cap over the baby’s head, the most affordable method that has been created is a fluid filled cooling blanked, which offers full body cooling.
There is also the issue of developing criteria for use of the cooling therapy. At this time babies that are put on cooling blankets must be considered full term babies (36 weeks gestation or more), they must show signs of oxygen deprivation such as seizures and poor muscle tone and of course, they must be less than 6 hours old.
