While therapeutic hypothermia, a relatively new cooling therapy, is more commonly used to prevent secondary injuries when blood rushes back into the heart, New York paramedics are being trained to use the treatment for emergency cardiac arrest cases. According to city officials, the use of this treatment has been shown to increase chances of survival and prevention of brain damage in cardiac arrest patients, and it will become standard procedure for paramedics from now on.

The goal of the treatment is to lower the patient’s body temperature to about six degrees for 24 hours. “We know that cooling your body’s temperature slows everything down,” said Salvatore J. Cassano, the city fire commissioner. “It brings your body out of that panic mode, and it actually reduces your body’s need for blood. That buys us time.”

Since January 2009, about 20 city hospitals have begun to make use of this as a part of a project organized by the city’s Emergency Medical Service and the Greater New York Hospital Association. The therapy is administered through various means including the use of cold packs or injections of chilled saline solution into the vein or bone.

Now, the number of hospitals has grown to 43 out of the 50 hospitals participating in the 911 emergency system. Also, since the pilot project’s beginning, the survival rate for the patients that were taken in has increased 20 percent as compared with 2008.

Now that the project has entered its second phase, paramedics are being trained to administer this cooling therapy to better improve cardiac arrest survival in patients. This would play an important part in improving the survival of patients as city paramedics respond to about 15,000 calls per year from people suffering from heart attack syndromes. Half of these result in cardiac arrest, according to the city’s Fire Department officials.

So far, things have been looking up for the participating hospitals, who are “extremely encouraged” by the results. Although New York is not the only city to implement this treatment as part of standard procedure, it is one of the major ones that could launch the popularity of cooling therapy to the rest of the country and, perhaps, eventually the entire healthcare industry.