Critical care doctors have placed humans in suspended animation for the first time, as part of a trial in the US that aims to make it possible to fix traumatic injuries that would otherwise cause death.

Samuel Tisherman, MD, FCCM, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and his team of medics had placed at least one patient in suspended animation.

The technique, officially called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), is being carried out on people who arrive at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore with an acute trauma.

Their heart will have stopped beating and they will have lost more than half their blood. There are only minutes to operate, with a less than 5% chance that they would normally survive.

EPR could help to buy doctors precious time. It involves replacing all of a patient’s blood with an ice-cold saline solution which rapidly cools their body temperature down. The patient’s brain activity almost completely stops. They are then disconnected from the cooling system and their body, which usually is classified as dead, and then moved to the operating room.

A surgical team has approximate 2 hours to mend the person’s injuries before they are warmed up and their heart restarted.

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