Bandages and tourniquets, goodbye. In the future, to avoid hemorrhages, a small electrical stimulation near the ear will be sufficient: a procedure named “neural tourniquet” by its inventors, capable of stimulating the activity of platelets, and thus avoiding the onset of hemorrhages. The technique was presented during this year’s Society for Neuroscience conference, and according to its inventors it could find application in the operating room, delivery room, and in all circumstances in which medical personnel may fear dangerous bleeding for their patients.
If the invention proves truly effective, it could have a strong impact on the clinical management of bleeding. An often underestimated problem, which costs the lives of over 60 thousand people every year in the United States alone. “Anyone who has worked in an emergency room or operating room knows how dramatic it can be to lose a patient to a bleed at home,” he said on Nature Jared Huston, a surgeon at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, and co-author of the invention. “A hemorrhage can kill much faster than sepsis.”
The neural tourniquet
The neural tourniquet works by acting on the vagus nerve, applying a light electric current that stimulates the spleen, the organ that houses about a third of the platelets present in the body, so that it releases them more promptly in case of problems, to form a clot in presence of hemorrhages.
Huston and colleagues tested the technique on pigs, demonstrating that it was able to reduce blood loss by 50 percent and the duration of bleeding by 40 percent. And they also tested the treatment on hemophiliac mice (an animal model for the human disease), obtaining comparable results.
Moving from animals to humans is obviously not trivial. And for this reason, the researchers have teamed up with a Texan biotech, Spark Biomedical, to carry out a clinical trial on humans. The definitive results are not yet available, but the preliminary ones released during the conference indicate a modest improvement in the activity of platelets and the stability of clots, even in the human organism.