Impact of Speed Of Rewarming After CaRdiac Arrest and ThErapeutic Hypothermia. A Randomized Controlled Pilot Study

Cardiac arrest (CA) is at present a major cause of mortality as well as a cause of disability for the surviving victims. In France, every year counts as 50,000 cardiac arrests responsible for 40 000 deaths. Thus, less than 20% of patients with heart failure discharged home. Then these patients had impaired quality of life associated with symptoms of fatigue, stress, anxiety hindering the resumption of business activity including. The prognosis is related in part to the initial cardiac rhythm present at the establishment of specialized resuscitation.

Recent progress in improving mortality and neurological outcome has been achieved over the last decade with systematic implementation of a period of targeted temperature management between 32 and 34 ° C (TTM 32-34) in patients with cardiac arrest and who benefited from the completion of at least one external electrical shock when help arrived. The mechanisms underlying this improvement of neurological prognosis are many, but mainly related to an attenuation of post resuscitation syndrome that combines in one hand an inflammatory response (mediated by pro-inflammatory cytokines including interleukin 6) and secondly the formation of reperfusion injury related to the production of radical oxygen species (free radicals).

While some studies have shown the feasibility of induction of this TTM 32-34 in prehospital conditions, no prospective study has evaluated the significant speed of warming in the end. An observational study in which the heating was carried passively, found that patients with an extended heating period (600 minutes) had a worse neurological outcome than patients with a duration of shorter warming (479 minutes) while a second retrospective study concluded the opposite in case of active warming . Besides the fact that these studies were observational, in the two originals randomized studies on TTM 32-34 in CA, the rate of warming was not like:

• Objective 6 hours with active warming is 0.5 ° C / h in the Australian study with an OR of 5.25 (1.47 - 18.76) for the neurological prognosis
• Objective 8 hours with passive warming of 0.37 ° C / h in the European study with an OR of 1.4 (1.08 - 1.81) for the neurological prognosis Although populations of two studies are obviously not comparable, it is possible that suboptimal speed of rewarming could mitigate some of the gain related to the implementation of TTM 32-34.

In this context, investigators propose to conduct a randomized, single-center pilot study comparing a fast warming in a slow warming when performing a TTM 33 patients presented with a shockable cardiac arrest.