Drugs Could Block Your Choking Brain from Killing Your Heart

​Before you die, your brain will go haywire. Some studies in mice have proposed that surges in brain activity before leaving this mortal coil are the cause of near-death experiences, but new research suggests that, far from giving us trippy hallucinations, pre-death brain activity during asphyxiation is actually what stops the heart from beating.

Basically, when you're running out of oxygen, your brain kills you. But we could potentially disrupt it with drugs.

"The idea is that if you save the heart, you save the brain—our study completely turns that idea upside down," said Jimo Borjigin, an associate professor of neurology and integrative physiology at the University of Michigan. "If anything, the reason the heart dies so quickly without oxygen is that the brain is making it die. The brain responds so violently and ends up suffocating the heart to death."

During asphyxiation, the brain is desperate for oxygen and frantically signals the heart to fix the problem by releasing a ton of chemicals called neurotransmitters that regulate the heartbeat (along with a lot of other things). This inadvertently causes the heart to go into arrest and quit, according to a paper published today in PNAS by Borjigin and her colleagues.

"Our brains evolved to respond in this way," Borjigin said. "Under normal circumstances, we're probably saved by this mechanism numerous times. When you have a fast heart rate and need it to slow down, for instance."

The good news is that this process can be stopped, according to Borjigin, slowing the onset of death. In an experiment that analyzed the brain and heart activity of dying rats, the researchers severed the rats' spinal cords, effectively blocking the transmission of neurotransmitters. After this surgery, the rats' brains and hearts were active for three times longer than the rats that didn't undergo the procedure.

By cutting off the hysterical signalling loop that causes the brain to kill the heart, which then kills the brain, both organs lived for longer, Borjigin said. If this approach was applied to humans, it could save lives.

"In patients, we would use drugs to block this," Borjigin said. "The idea down the road is that once we discover the magic cocktail that can reproduce the results we see in our studies, EMTs—instead of doing resuscitation—maybe the first thing they could do is shield the heart from the brain's harmful response."

If her work pans out then perhaps, in the future, our brains will finally stop trying to kill us.