9 replies to this topic

[AaronCW]

What should an individual who is preparing for a cryonic suspension consider in advance of the procedure? This is a topic which I have considered for awhile. I even considered investing time to research and publish a paper on the topic. I understand that the technology is far from perfect, but if a person is prepared to undergo the procedure it is logical that they should do what they can to achieve an optimal outcome.

The sort of preparations I am referring to are primarily pharmacological interventions that would precede legal 'death', and it could become broader. For example, and this is the example with which I would like to start the discussion (get ready all you Nootropic fans), why has it not been (to my knowledge) recommended that a person who is at a high risk of death use a high dose (9mg) of Hydergine to prevent brain damage from oxygen deprivation?

Imagine a combination of Suda's cat brain freezing experiment with Emmenhegger's experiment of preventing damage due to cerebral ischemia in cats using Hydergine (Emmenhegger H, Meier Ruge W, " The actions of Hydergine ® on the brain" Pharmacology (1968) 1:65-78).

PS. If anyone has an abstract of this study it would be great to post, as I lost where I put mine.

I am aware that a cocktail of drugs is administrated shortly after the pronouncement of death, but I am not aware that they make any recommendations for what drugs you might take in advance.

[treonsverdery]

well the opioid peptide DADLE confers an order of magnitude more time to transplant chilled organs A bunch of DADLE or a similar but better peptide might be beneficial on keeping the organs more alive between cessation of vitals n freezing.

[bgwowk]

Premedication of the Human Cryopreservation Patient

http://www.alcor.org...l/standby7.html

[treonsverdery]

Reading the alcor drug list I think BHT or TBHQ or propyl gallate the FDA GRAS food preservatives deserve listing.

[AaronCW]

Thanks for the link.

Interestingly it doesn't discuss Hydergine specifically. I think that the overall tone of the article in the Alcor website is fairly pessimistic. I fully agree that it is necessary to do a complete evaluation of a patient (as a physician) before deciding which drugs would be appropriate, but it would seem that a number of drugs (such as high-potency vitamin supplementation and hydergine) would be appropriate for the average patient to use. I feel that it is unhelpful to characterize the conditions under which the average patient dies as "very complex and uncontrolled", suggesting that no single drug would be appropriate for the average patient (barring specific conditions which would present a risk factor).

The writers of this article suggest that the research on drugs that prevent cerebral ischemia only look at "specific questions", the answers to which only apply to very controlled conditions.

The studies on Hydergine that I am familiar with suggest that this drug is effective in preventing damage from cerebral ischemia resulting from any circumstance in which either blood flow to the brain or oxygen levels are reduced. It would seem that this would apply to almost any situation considering that the pronouncement of legal death is required before any subsequent interventions can begin.

[eternaltraveler]

alcor would be in a very tricky legal position on recommending any prescription drugs specifically for patients to take in preparation for death.

[garethnelsonuk]

If it was legal to do so, it would be better to use only cooling and general anasthetic (cool the patient under general anasthetic as done for hypothermic surgery and begin perfusion straight away). This is only likely to be allowed once the whole procedure becomes reversible. Before it is legal to do so, as elrond says Alcor (or any organisation or individual in fact) would be in a tricky position to recommend any prescription drugs to take in order to prepare for death. Premedication with antioxidants and other nutrients, over the counter medication and perhaps certain herbs (ginkgo biloba and guarana come to mind) are better legally though could still cause problems if the medical authorities wanted to suggest that such premedication speeded up the patient's death.

I actually find this rather funny as administrating neuroprotective medications may in fact delay a patient's death and very high antioxidant intake may contribute in a major way to treating cancer.

[treonsverdery]

I've been reading studies where they place peptide drugs directly at the ventral spaces of lab mammal brains. I think that this strategy of administering drugs will be useful with cryonics partly as IV cryopreparatives face the blood brain barrier (BBB) unless a blood brain barrier surgery is performed. The difference between a blood brain barrierectomy n a massive cerebral hemmorage is debatable but delivering drugs to the brain ventally is clean as well as functional. DMAE is a molecule structured to pass the blood brain barrier. It could be that either adding DMAE's cholorophenoxy BBB pass structure to many of the drugs listed at the alcor site will improve effectiveness.

Thinking about the DADLE peptide that gives an order of magnitude more time to transplant I've read an abstract where polysorbate coated nanospheres full of an opioid peptide were more effective at passing the blood brain barrier. If I were being cryopreserved I'd be keen on IV as well as ventral DADLE, the alcor stuff plus whatever is most plausibly a BHA dissolved with a highly BBB passing lipid.

Wikipedia notes that Mechanisms for drug targeting in the brain involve going either "through" or "behind" the BBB. Modalities for drug delivery through the BBB entail disruption of the BBB by osmotic means, biochemically by the use of vasoactive substances[] or even by localized exposure to High intensity focused ulatrasound also known as HIFU

This just says ultrasound promoted drug delivery of cyroprotectives to the brain to me. Yay

Edited by treonsverdery, 10 December 2006 - 03:45 AM.

[John Schloendorn]

If you have some idea of when you are going to die, the by far most critical thing to do seems to be to get to Scottsdale no matter the cost. This will minimize the time you spend dead and above liquid nitrogen temperature, i.e. the time when damage can occur.

[treonsverdery]

Maybe I'd use craigslist.com: Zombie seeks ride to alcor

Passing more hydergine through the BBB might be accomplished with adding hydergine a blend of ergot alkaloid mesylates to various highly BBB passing lipids then finding which lipids did the best job. Wikipedia says that the BBB blocks big molecules like hydergine C33H45N5O5 that are more than 500 daltons (a nitrogen atom is 14 daltons) ventral hydergine might be a go. the wikipedia BBB article says

The existence of such a barrier was first noticed in experiments by Paul Ehrlich in the late-19th century. Ehrlich was a bacteriologist who was studying staining, used for many studies to make fine structures visible. Some of these dyes, notably the aniline dyes that were then popular, would stain all of the organs of an animal except the brain when injected. At the time, Ehrlich attributed this to the brain simply not picking up as much of the dye.

However, in a later experiment in 1913, Edwin Goldmann (one of Ehrlich's students) injected the dye into the spine directly. He found that in this case the brain would become dyed, but the rest of the body remained dye-free. This clearly demonstrated the existence of some sort of barrier between the two sections of the body

Edited by treonsverdery, 10 December 2006 - 04:11 AM.