Death redefined?

[Reaver]

A recent discovery that seems to be quite revolutionary to me, although I'm not involved in any medical fields. The actually discovery is that cell's die when cut off from their blood supply after hours. So why then do people that have had a heart attack "die" after their oxygen supply is resumed in only 5 minutes? I'll let you read it to find out.

Here

[D1st0rt]

Interesting, I'll want to talk to my EMT friends

[Vykromond]

Yeah, from what I understand this sort of reexamination of clinical death has been coming down the pipe for a few years. Maybe one of our more medically-inclined members has something interesting to input

[Edify]

Pretty interesting. So, the cells die when the oxygen is resumed after a period of having none. Odd.

[Singularity]

Most of these "amazing breakthroughs" in the newspapers are quite inflated. I've seen enough of these "research has shown" crap to be a bit more sceptical. I'd like to read the original research paper, where they actually have a discussion instead of just a bolded claim.
Also, when they say "cells" do they mean brain cells? As I think the cells using the most oxygen are going to get hit most by a lack of oxygen, aside from the fact that brain cells don't tend to regenerate after damage.

Edit: bothered to look up the original article on pubmed, where you can (with a university subscription) look up the article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...=pubmed_docsum
Maybe I'll follow it up, but I hope they had more to base that article on.

Also, an article that shows the effect are minimal can be found here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...=pubmed_docsum

[Hero*]

so once there is no blood flowing back to the heart the person has a heart attack..and therefor cant get O2 to the rest of the body cause the bloods not goin into the lungs and the capillaries arent exchaning the O2 and CO2..iunno. im only first year but hell i dont get this. wouldnt the cells die cause there is no O2 being transported to them? or can they last longer with no O2?

[Galleleo]

Blood is not supposed to go into the lungs.. I am pretty sure that is a bad thing.

The case is, I think, without the heart beating the braincells get no new blood and oxygen. They used to think that would mean you're dead in about 5 minutes if you did not receive any CPR in the meanwhile. Now however, they found out that those cells don't die for hours. What makes them die is the sudden return of oxygen (at the hospital when being reanimated) which they can't handle. The body then sees the cells as a bad cell (i.e. cancer cell) and rejects it, killing the cell.

In other words, people are pronounced after about 30 min of trying, while the cells aren't dead for hours if nothing happens to them. The cells kinda o.d. on oxygen when the reanimation is done, sort of speak.

That is if I understood it right.

[Reaver]

Blood is not supposed to go into the lungs.. I am pretty sure that is a bad thing.

The case is, I think, without the heart beating the braincells get no new blood and oxygen. They used to think that would mean you're dead in about 5 minutes if you did not receive any CPR in the meanwhile. Now however, they found out that those cells don't die for hours. What makes them die is the sudden return of oxygen (at the hospital when being reanimated) which they can't handle. The body then sees the cells as a bad cell (i.e. cancer cell) and rejects it, killing the cell.

Yes, this is correct.

[Epinephrine]

He's right except that blood is supposed to go to your lungs. That's what the right side of your heart is for (pumping blood into your lungs).

[Da1andonly]

This is like ER all over again!

[Noah]

You pump your blood to a part below the lungs (didn't find the English name after a quick search, got limited time), which puts the oxygen from your blood into your blood stream.

You're not supposted to have blood IN your lungs, which is lethal and called hemothorax.

[Epinephrine]

Wrong again. You're SUPPOSED to have blood IN your lungs. A hemothorax is blood in the pleural space, which is not inside the lung organ.

[PaulOakenfold]

How about those couple of milligrams of DMT in our brain (this can be done prematurely using DMT releasing substances like Mescaline - found the in San Pedro cacti, Aminita Muscaria etc - which are somewhat intense and life changing from what I remember of them years ago.) that are released when someone 'dies' and is why people have 'religious' experiences when having near death episodes. Basically we're born with a religious experience in our brains.

As a religious type myself, this doesn't take away from any 'life after death' arguments that human beings so long for, but it is an interesting explanation for why people time after time see the 'go to the light' and other religious visions when they're pronounced dead for a couple of seconds.

[Noah]

Almost dying in itself will give a different perspective on life.

If I were shot by a stray bullet, and pronounced dead at a point, but brought back to life, I'd value it more.

You don't know what you have untill you've either lost it or been close to losing it.

Oh, and yeah epi, you're supposted to have blood in your lungs in the same way as you're supposted to have blood in your tissue. Tissue everywhere, both internal and external needs blood, but the lungs as an organ doesn't require any extra blood apart from that.

[Regen]

I would have put my 2 cents in but it seems the question has already been answered.