Outcomes in hypothermic cardiac arrest without evidence of abrupt cooling

The standard of resuscitating hypothermic out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OOHCA) patients until they have been rewarmed to normal body temperature primarily arises from case reports, case series and descriptive studies reporting successful prolonged resuscitations, typically following immersion or avalanche [1-7]. [...]we conducted two sensitivity analyses: (1) limiting our definition of hypothermia to only ED-assigned diagnoses to exclude any cases of in-hospital hypothermia following resuscitation; and (2) since diagnosis coding practices may vary by hospital, limiting the analysis to only those hospitals that reported a hypothermia ICD code for at least one OOHCA patient. [...]we included OOHCA patients regardless of age, but age alone was not a useful predictor of outcomes: survivors in both groups ranged from infants to octogenarians.