• Question: can we ever bring a human back to life after they are dead for more than 1 hour

    Asked by sevty5 to Louise, Michaela, Sian, Steve, Yvette on 17 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Sian Harding

      Sian Harding answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Yes,there are examples of this when people have drowned in very cold water

    • Photo: Steven Kiddle

      Steven Kiddle answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      I don’t know, wikipedia (under clinical death), say that after 5-10 minutes the brain suffers irreparable damage. This means a human revived after an hour would almost certainly have considerable brain damage.

    • Photo: Michaela Livingstone

      Michaela Livingstone answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Well there has been quite a lot of documentation of people being clinically dead for short periods and then being “brough back” – I did read somewhere about some russian bloke who apparently was dead for 3 days in a morgue before he came back to life, but I’m not sure I believe that. If the brain is dead then you’re gone I think – people can keep a body alive but it’s not the same. PLUS once the heart and lungs stop working your cells no longer get oxygen and other nutrients they need to stay alive, so the cells soon start dying off SO I’m not sure whether someone could be brought back to life with no long-term effects after being dead for an hour – but I doubt it. I may be wrong though.

    • Photo: Louise Johnson

      Louise Johnson answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      There have been cases where people have been trapped under ice for over an hour and it’s still been possible to resuscitate them, because the cold stopped their brain from using up oxygen. And there are tricks surgeons use to allow them to stop a patient’s heart and circulation for up to an hour without killing them outright. I think medicine will probably improve on that and in future it may be possible to extend that kind of “death” for over an hour.

      That’s a very different thing from bringing someone back who died an hour ago at normal temperatures outside an operating theatre. I don’t think that’ll ever be possible, because blood stopping in the brain causes a lot of damage very quickly.

    • Photo: Yvette Wilson

      Yvette Wilson answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      I don’t think so because their tissues (specially brain) gets damaged from lack of oxygen.

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