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Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation is an experimental medical procedure where an emergency department patient is cooled into suspended animation for an hour to prevent incipient death from ischemia, such as the blood loss following a shooting or stabbing. EPR uses hypothermia, drugs, and fluids to "buy time" for resuscitative surgery. If successful, EPR may someday be deployed in the field so that paramedics can suspend and preserve patients for transport.
EPR is similar to deep hypothermic circulatory arrest in that hypothermia is induced. However, the purposes and procedures of EPR differ from DHCA. DHCA induces hypothermia to aid preplanned surgery, whereas EPR is an emergency procedure in cases where an emergency department patient is rapidly dying from blood loss and will not otherwise survive long enough for the patient's wounds to be stitched up. In EPR, blood is replaced by a saline solution, and the patient is cooled into a suspended state where metabolism is slowed and brain activity ceases. This gives the surgeon perhaps an hour to close the wounds before a warming and recirculation procedure is applied.
Human trials began in the 2010s. The trial procedure involves rapidly inducing profound hypothermia with an aortic flush in trauma victims that have suffered cardiac arrest and failed standard resuscitative efforts.