Teachable Medical News  article 10072018

Can a blood filtering device save you from dying?

 The news item:

The potential use of a new blood filtering apparatus was reported by Bloomberg News web site: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-10/this-cartridge-of-plastic-beads-can-filter-blood-during-surgery

The articles states that:  “CytoSorb, a filter attached to a hospital’s existing blood-pumping equipment, uses a cylindrical cartridge to remove toxins from a patient’s circulatory system. Removing such toxins can reduce inflammation, which if left unchecked can damage tissues and organs.  The cartridge is about the size of a drinking glass, and it contains several million polymer beads, each the size of a grain of sand. An attached pump funnels the patient’s blood through the cartridge.   Blood cells, antibodies, and other essential substances flow around the beads, but toxins and inflammatory proteins, especially those repelled by water, are trapped inside. A typical course of treatment for sepsis requires three to five cartridges.”

 

So, Why Do I Care??

The cartridge is used to treat a disease called sepsis, which is bacterial, viral or fungal infection in the blood. There are about 1 million sepsis cases yearly in the Unites States. Severe sepsis can cause death by causing dangerous fever, damage to the kidneys, heart or brain. These organs are damaged, because of bacterial toxins cause cell damage in these organs, because blood flow is restricted to them because of blood clots, and because the immune system attacks the damaged cells inside those organs.  The mortality rate is 50% in patients with septic shock.

 

Plain English, Please

So, let’s talk about sepsis first.  Have you observed what happens to your skin once you cut it or scraped?    A redness appears around the wound edge, and then some pus (yellow gooey fluid) might form around the scab.  Those things happen, because your immune system is fighting bacteria that fell into the wound.  Our immune system fights bacteria, because bacteria may directly kill our organs, and bacteria also make toxins that kill damage our organs.    During this fight the immune system destroys both bacteria, and the damaged cells of our organs.    Now, imagine what happens if the bacteria would get directly into a blood vessel!!  This happens when catheters are placed into blood vessels in the intensive care units of hospitals, or when large skin areas damaged by burns.  Your immune system now has to chase down those bacteria as they’re traveling through the entire body.  The immune system destroys the bacteria, but cells of the brain, heart, kidneys are also destroyed, because they were damaged by the toxins.  So, sepsis comes with widespread damage reaching the kidneys, heart and brain; we need all those organs to stay alive.  Putting it all together: sepsis is a life threatening disorder.

 

Now, let’s talk about how this cartridge helps sepsis patients.  Picture a patient whose blood is loaded with bacterial toxins, and the kidneys, the heart and the brain is slowly damaged by the bacteria and the toxins.  What if we could just filter out those toxins from the blood?  That would remove the damage-causing agents from the patient, and will put those organs on the mend.  Coffee filters remove the unwanted coffee grounds from our coffee.  The blood filtering device removes the unwanted (and damaging) toxins from the blood.  As a consequence of using this filter, sepsis patients have a much better chance of surviving and recovering from the disease.  The tricky part is how to keep the very useful red blood cells, the platelets and white blood cells unharmed by the filtering, but these folks who invented the filter have solved those problems.