New research suggests that, fortunately, doctors are skilled at correctly identifying when a person dies – a crucial aspect of ensuring healthy organs for donation. At the same time, the body can sometimes experience flirtations of cardiac activity even after death has become truly irreversible, according to study published in New England of Medicine.
There is no lack of morbid curiosity around death. But according to the researchers behind this project, known as the Prediction of Death and Physiology after the removal of the therapy study or DePPaRT, there are many things we do not know for sure about the last minutes of a person’s life.
Since 2014, they have been collecting data on vital signs from dying patients in Canada, the UK and the Czech Republic as part of their work. Their main purpose was to document as much as possible about the death process, especially in critically ill people who are removed from life. They also studied how and why families decide to donate their loved ones’ organs shortly before death and how the donation affects them. The people in the study – about 600 in total – were included only with the express consent of their families. The project received funding from the Canadian government, as well as the Canadian Donation and Transplant Research Program.
Although some organs, such as the kidneys, can be kept viable for more than a day before being transplanted, others, such as the heart, must be transplanted within a few hours. Any delay can be literally the difference between life and death for organ recipients. But people are sensitive to death, many families and some doctors can hope for a miraculous recovery even after a person is taken out of life support.
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“We recognize that there are stories about people coming back to life, even from members of the medical community. So, we really wanted to provide scientific evidence about the process of death, to dispel any potential myths for humans, ”said Gizmodo, lead project researcher Sonny Dhanani, a pediatrician at CHEO Research Institute in Ontario.
Nowadays, doctors in Canada are said wait at least five minutes after the blood flow has stopped after the end of life care before officially calling the time of death of a person (in the US, two to five minutes is recommended) In patients studied by this team, there were no cases in that the doctors were wrong in determining the death. That being said, the film’s favorable sign of death – an immediate flat line on an EKG monitor – was not entirely correct.
Sometimes, in about 14% of patients, there were on-off moments of cardiac activity. Importantly, however, these moments usually lasted a few seconds and did not lead to a complete restart of the heart or a sudden awakening of the people. The longest time it took for a heart to stop completely was about four minutes, indicating that the five-minute rule is indeed a good time to wait for the death to be determined (if the heart will restart at that time). period, doctors will then wait another five minutes before declaring the time of death).
“Doctors and families should be aware of this in 14% of cases. But they should also be reassured that it does not mean that the person will come back to life, “said Dhanani.
This insurance is too important for families, especially when it comes to decisions about organ donation. Of course, people can give themselves this permission by pre-registering as donor organs.
Dhanani and his team were surprised by how many families chose to participate in the project when asked (93%). And he hopes his team’s work will help people better recognize the benefits of organ donation, while reassuring them about the process.
“Ultimately, we want our research to help open up conservation around death, dying and donation, which are topics that can be uncomfortable,” he said. “And we hope that this research can reassure people who are worried about being a donor, perhaps because they fear that their organs will be taken before they die. Donation has a clear process, and our research has shown that people will not be mistreated. ”