With the advancement of medicine in which the prolongation of life is reaching levels never seen before in history, a taboo remains to this day: how to define a person's death? In popular conversation, a common answer to this question is twofold, usually: the person's heart stopped or they were "brain dead." Although these answers are often taken as absolute truths, recent recorded cases may bring the need to review this concept of death.
The time of 20 minutes in which an individual's heart stops, making it impossible for the brain to receive oxygen, is usually the deadline for defining the patient's death. The point is that some cases of medicine published recently show that the delimitation between life and death is not as easy to define as it was imagined until then, that is, there are reports of patients who stayed more than four hours without a heartbeat and were resuscitated without any brain damage.
According to Professor Sam Parnia, director of resuscitation research at Stony Brook University in New York (USA), the brain goes into a kind of “hibernation” after the heart stops. It is as if the brain protected itself from death and, in order to achieve this activity, reduced its actions as much as possible, waiting for better conditions to be reactivated, explains Parnia.
In order for the body to “come back to life” without sequelae after the 20-minute period, Parnia points out that adequate resuscitation techniques are necessary so that the body can return to normal after the heart resumes its beating. For example, carrying out the application of the process after lowering the patient's body temperature so that the brain resumes its functions slowly and gradually, preventing it from collapsing in an attempt to return to functioning.
Perhaps even a successful brain transplant, a dream narrated by science fiction books and which is currently being considered, according to the latest medical scientific journals. At the same time that new discoveries must be dreamed of, it is also necessary to reflect on whether medicine should have the primary objective of offering people quality of life or focusing on prolonging their lives.
- Article written by Diego Rennan from Team Eu Sem Fronteiras.
