Explorations of the therapeutic potential of influencing metabolism during critical illness

Abstract

Our experiments suggests that reducing inflammation might be a promising therapeutic strategy to reduce organ damage in the critically ill patient. Hypothermia seems to be the perfect strategy as shown in our experiments. As hypo-metabolism and hypothermia are linked, we cannot conclude that reducing metabolism per se is associated with organ protection. Although induction of a suspended animation-like state with H2S seems futuristic, the anti-inflammatory effect of the compound is interesting and promising. Future research direction should focus on slow releasing H2S molecules and on discontinuous H2S injection to reduce accumulation and toxicity in organs