Issue link: http://viewer.e-digitaledition.com/i/858493
Cardiac arrest biomarker could impact patient recovery Often, CA patients are not discovered and resuscitated until well after the cardiac incident has taken place, making it difficult for physicians to specify proper treatment and expectations for patients and their families. Determining how long the patient's brain and other organs have been deprived of oxygen is key to a patient's diagnosis and outlook, and helps guide physicians to the most appropriate treatment course. While there are existing biomarkers physicians can test for CA, many of these cannot be detected until hours after the patient has been resuscitated. Even then, accuracy is questionable and results can take days to analyze. The levels of certain biomarkers can max out early during the oxygen deprivation process, limiting their utility in determining exactly how long the patient's body has gone without oxygen. An untapped resource Investigator Junhwan Kim, PhD, set out to find a new biomarker that could tell clinicians how long oxygen flow was stopped as soon as patients wake up. His team discovered a promising candidate in a type of lipid that breaks down during CA, causing the amount of this particular lipid in patients' blood to rise. Dr. Kim and his team studied the change in lipid levels after CA. Their findings showed that the level of a certain lipid — lysophosphatidylinositol — increased for up to 60 minutes after CA and may serve as a much better indicator of how long patients were oxygen- deprived than previous biomarkers. Moving forward Dr. Kim and his team continue to study this new lipid biomarker, and additional clinical trials are in the works. Their results could change the way doctors approach treatment and survival for CA patients. "Having a method to detect the onset of cardiac arrest and the length of oxygen deprivation will help physicians make more informed decisions regarding treatment," said Dr. Kim. "Patients and their families also benefit as doctors will be able to more immediately assess the severity of the patient's injuries and have more definitive indicators of survival." A new discovery by researchers may improve diagnoses and treatment for cardiac arrest (CA) patients. "Junhwan Kim and his team are close to determining ways to better administer treatment following cardiac arrest. This has the potential to improve the lives of the nearly 300,000 Americans who suffer a cardiac arrest each year." — Kev i n J. Tra c ey, M D, p re s i d e nt a n d C E O o f t h e Fe i n s t e i n I n s t i t u t e 6 / Issue 2 2017 Research