Harefuah
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Mild therapeutic hypothermia has been shown to reduce mortality and neurological morbidity in post cardiac arrest survivors. These beneficial effects had initially been reported in retrospective studies and subsequently more evidence has been gathered by two cornerstone randomized control trials. All these studies focused on the acute outcome and the clinical status at the time of hospital discharge. The main goal of this study was to describe the long term effects of therapeutic hypothermia in this population. ⋯ In the current phase of the study, a tendency in favor of mild cooling was observed in the short and medium term outcomes in patients resuscitated after out of hospital cardiac arrest due to fatal arrhythmia. The current results indicate that in spite of high survival rates after the acute stage in the cooling group, the long term mortality rate in this group is still high.