This is, actually, an important avenue of contemporary research, highly funded by DARPA at Texas A&M – although this research is from Germany – and this article is about one of the methods tested that got into the lay press a year two back.
The driving principle is that, the best way to keep someone newly dead from starting to go down all those cellular pathways that make cells go “pop”, is to shut down cellular metabolism and starve those pathways of cellular energy. This seems like a sound idea – although, a lot of other cellular pathways that maintain cellular integrity and electrochemical gradient stability are also funded by those same pathways. But, the theory is that if you have a tissue hypoxic event, slow everything down to buy you more time, fix the overriding problem, and then resuscitate the patient.
Didn’t work for these folks. 61 Wistar rats given hydrogen sulfide as their agent to paralyze cellular metabolism. Significantly better pH and less base excess initially during acute resuscitation from cellular hypoxia, so it is doing something to prevent tissue oxygen debt – but their primary outcome of neurologic preservation, they showed temporary neurologic preservation at an interim test, but no differences at the 7 day point, and no histochemical differences after sacrifice.
This sort of research is still clearly poking about in the dark right now, but it is absolutely the future of resuscitation – to give us a reason for hope in the trauma bay that return of circulation is neurologically intact and not simply just for organ donation.