Abstract
The beneficial effects of mild to moderate hypothermia in experimental models of brain [4–6,9,15,20,26] and spinal cord injury [1,18,21,22,24,27] have been reported in many laboratories. Using models of diffuse as well as focal injury, brain and spinal cord cooling have been shown to protect against neuronal damage and improve behavioral outcome. Recently, posttraumatic hypothermia has also been reported to protect against axonal damage [14,16,19]. In addition, the blood-brain barrier consequences of cerebral ischemia and traumatic brain injury are attenuated by moderate hypothermia [8,12,23]. Taken together, these investigations, using different animal models and various morphological and functional endpoints, emphasize how remarkably effective hypothermia can be in protecting central nervous system tissue [2]. Importantly, these experimental findings of therapeutic hypothermia have been supported by clinical data where hypothermic protection has been demonstrated in patients after cardiac arrest and brain trauma [7,10,13,17,25].