Word: oxygenated
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After a numbing discussion on how long a dog's brain can survive without oxygen at various temperatures, Dr. Robert J. Boyd brought the audience at the College's surgical forum straight up in their chairs with an unscheduled addendum: "We recently performed selective brain cooling successfully in a clinical case at Stanford Medical Center." In this way, Dr. Boyd reported an advance that may prove to be as epochal for brain surgery as was the development of the heart-lung machine for operations inside the heart...
...have been more hampered than those working on any other part of the body by their inability to get a "dry field" to work in. The brain has a superabundant blood supply, and is more exacting than any other organ in its demands: if deprived of blood (and therefore oxygen) for more than about four minutes at normal temperatures, it suffers irreparable damage. At lower temperatures the brain can survive longer, so some neurosurgeons have operated while the patient's whole body was cooled. But others felt that the brain needed to be more deeply chilled than the body...
...Stanford University, Dr. Boyd and colleagues found from their dog experiments that if the rest of the body stayed at near-normal temperature and the brain alone was cooled, it could be dropped as low as 68°F. for up to an hour with no oxygen at all and without apparent damage. This meant that they could shut off its circulation entirely and give the surgeon a virtually dry field. Last month the team tried it on a 54-year-old woman with a tumor in the right mastoid and middle ear. The tumor was so heavily supplied with...
Though the patient has since had a stormy recuperation, this may have been mainly because of the unavoidable severity of the operation. She has shown no signs of brain damage due to oxygen shortage. Her case opens a surgical horizon with possibilities of far safer and more effective operations for aneurysms ("blowouts" in brain blood vessels) and some brain tumors...
...team of six doctors, nurses, and technicians hover at chamber-side, the radiologist maneuvers a betatron into position. After slamming shut a hatch at the end of the chamber, technicians force oxygen in. After 15 minutes under full pressure, during which the patient's body is closely watched by means of closed-circuit television, the radiologist turns on the betatron, shoots radiation at the tumor. Following treatment, the patient is decompressed in deep-sea-diver fashion and taken to the recovery room...