Neural Tourniquet: Stop bleeding through nerve stimulation effectively
Neural Tourniquet: Stop bleeding through nerve stimulation effectively
chicago, illinois
forget gazzen and associations: Electrical stimulation Near the ear could help reduce bleeding. Researchers hope that this technology one day before operations, Births and other events that can be used for a risk of dangerously uncontrolled bleeding .
The treatment, referred to by the creators as the "neural tourniquet", increases the activity of Thromboocytes, which are cell fragments, the blood clots, according to the provisional results that at the conference of the Society for Neuroscience Were presented in 2024.
"Anyone who has worked in an emergency or operating room knows how cruel it can be to lose someone through bleeding," says Jared Huston, a dream axis surgeon to the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, who has developed the treatment. "Bleeding can lead to death much faster than sepsis."
The heavy load of bleeding
Uncontrolled bleeding in the United States annually leads to around 60,000 deaths 1 . In order to reduce this number, Huston and his colleagues develop treatment that the vagusnerven , the large nerve fiber networks that connect the body to the brain . Despite its name, the treatment does not work like a typical tourniquet that blocks blood flow to injured limbs. Rather, the electrical impulses help to stimulate the spleen, which stores about a third of the platelets in the body. Stimulation prepares the thrombocytes to form a clot.
To test the treatment, the researchers made small cuts in the ears of healthy pigs 2 . Compared to animals that did not receive treatment, the pigs treated lost 50 % less blood, and the duration of their bleeding was 40 % shorter.
The team also tested the treatment on mice with Hemophilia, a disease in which the blood does not really coincide , and found similar results 3 . The experiment also indicates how nerve stimulation achieves these results: it increases the calcium absorption of the thrombocytes in the spleen and is ready to release your content when you reach an injured blood vessel. Both processes are crucial for the coagulation.
slow activation of the platelets
The time process of treatment could be a problem: platelets were most active two hours after stimulation - which the device could make impractical in an emergency. Huston continues to analyze data on whether treatment could lead to excessive blood clotting elsewhere in the body, but he says that nerve stimulation has been used safely for decades, which gives him no reason.
In addition, it is unclear whether the increased stability of clots actually leads to reduced bleeding in humans, says Svetlana Mastitskaya, a cardiovascular neuroscientist at the University of Bristol, UK. "It would be nice to see a visible effect of the intervention," she says.
Huston replies that studying bleeding and volume in humans is more difficult than in animals due to ethical concerns about the deliberate damage to people. Nevertheless, it could be possible to determine the effectiveness of the treatment by examining people with hemophilia or those who undergo surgery.
Researchers test the device Also in women with type 1 from Willebrand disease, which often suffer from excessive menstrual bleeding and can lose up to one liter of blood during menstruation, says Navid KhodaParast, Chief Scientific Officer from Spark Biomedical. Participants receive one hour of stimulation twice a day to reduce their bleeding. The results are still pending, he says.
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bravo-iñiguez, C. E. et al. Nature commun. 14, 3122 (2023).
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