Blood clotting is not caused by red blood cells but by platelets.
I thought ischemic tissue caused RBCs to form Rouleaux complexes. Even without RBC's, ischemia causes plenty of changes that have effects functionally equivalent to clotting: Swelling of myocytes and the endothelium, subsarcolemmal and endothelial blebs, et cetera.
I suppose another option would be to suggest that the patient to start taking anticoagulants before death. I'm not sure whether that would have legal implications though.
This is certainly helpful and doesn't seem to have been done in past patients, but we're mostly talking about unexpected settings here, where no standby is available. I don't think it has any legal implications, at least the Best's article doesn't mention any.
See the third paragraph of Coagulation - the diagram of the blood clotting cascade is on the right. I've never heard of rouleaux having a role in blood clotting - a quick PubMed search turned up this case study, but it was due to mutations in the protein fibrinogen.
I don't think it has any legal implications, at least the Best's article doesn't mention any.
I was thinking that since the drugs are dangerous (even more so if you're already in a weakened condition), it would be viewed as attempting to hasten their death. Especially if someone overdosed ei...
I just read this article (which is well worth reading for anyone interested in cryonics). One of the important things that the article points out is that, while it takes some time for the memory structures of the brain to degrade due to ischemia, one of the more rapid effects is blood clotting in the fine capillaries of the brain after fairly brief ischemia. This reduces the flow of cryoprotectant, and causes large swathes of neural tissue to be frozen, instead of vitrified, which would be catastrophic for personal identity. While this is not a problem for best-case 'standby' cryonics, it is a problem for those who cannot afford a standby team, or are simply hit by cars.
Being an engineer, my first thought is that this is ridiculous, and there has to be a better solution to the problem. It may be possible to build a device, maybe the size of a shoe box, which can be deployed in the field by a minimally-trained amateur (like a defibrillator), and perfuses the brain with cold saline and anti-coagulants -- or even a synthetic oxygen carrier). I'm picturing a cylinder of fluid, large needles with sterilizing caps for tapping the jugular and carotid arteries, and a gas cylinder to provide pressure. You'd simply break a chemical cold pack, put a plastic neck brace in place and insert the needles, and press a button.
Such a device could even be useful to non-cryonicists, as a way to prevent ischemic injury in people found medically dead at the scene of an accident, during transport to the hospital.
Does anyone with more of a medical background know if such a machine would be at all feasible? I can't imagine it would be expensive to construct.