Temporary theraputic hypothermia is very useful for treatment of cardiac arrest and other neurological insults, as it reduces reperfusion injury and the slower inflammatory brain damage that happens in the hours and days after a period of ischemia.
As for life support, people can live for decades on tube feeding and artificial ventilation, and years on chemical feed dripped into their blood (at the cost of liver function). That’s just letting normal biology proceed though, substituting some of the functions of a fully functional nervous system or other organ systems. If you are looking to try to preserve degrading function longer, or stretch out the time you have to treat something, you would want to try to replicate a state like hibernation, in which temperature and biochemical reaction rates can be lowered while maintaining the presence of actual life and repair functions. The particulars of such a state would dictate if someone who was already ill or damaged in some way stood much of a chance of surviving it. Though a lot of neurological trauma is already treated with artificial comas to reduce the brain’s bloodflow and metabolic rate, and there was a recent report of successful treatment for rabies that involved a months-long induced coma.
...Though you really don’t want to spend much time with your blood flow moving through tubes outside your body that you don’t absolutely have to. It’s just asking for infection and all sorts of clotting/embolism problems, either due to anticoagulants giving you bleeds inside your body, or your blood clotting in tubes not lined with endotheial cells and not shaped for near-perfect laminar flow, or microscopic bubbles entering the flow through a crack in the plastic too small to see. There’s even indications that a large fraction of people on heart-lung machines for a single surgery have micro-embolisms throughout the brain caused by the blood issues that come about form extracorporial circulation.
Temporary theraputic hypothermia is very useful for treatment of cardiac arrest and other neurological insults, as it reduces reperfusion injury and the slower inflammatory brain damage that happens in the hours and days after a period of ischemia.
As for life support, people can live for decades on tube feeding and artificial ventilation, and years on chemical feed dripped into their blood (at the cost of liver function). That’s just letting normal biology proceed though, substituting some of the functions of a fully functional nervous system or other organ systems. If you are looking to try to preserve degrading function longer, or stretch out the time you have to treat something, you would want to try to replicate a state like hibernation, in which temperature and biochemical reaction rates can be lowered while maintaining the presence of actual life and repair functions. The particulars of such a state would dictate if someone who was already ill or damaged in some way stood much of a chance of surviving it. Though a lot of neurological trauma is already treated with artificial comas to reduce the brain’s bloodflow and metabolic rate, and there was a recent report of successful treatment for rabies that involved a months-long induced coma.
...Though you really don’t want to spend much time with your blood flow moving through tubes outside your body that you don’t absolutely have to. It’s just asking for infection and all sorts of clotting/embolism problems, either due to anticoagulants giving you bleeds inside your body, or your blood clotting in tubes not lined with endotheial cells and not shaped for near-perfect laminar flow, or microscopic bubbles entering the flow through a crack in the plastic too small to see. There’s even indications that a large fraction of people on heart-lung machines for a single surgery have micro-embolisms throughout the brain caused by the blood issues that come about form extracorporial circulation.