Abstract
The present level of cardiorespiratory resuscitation methods enables the restoration of life exceeding the period of clinical death lasting about 10 minutes. The restoration of heart activity after this period does not correlate with the restoration of the brain functions.
Clinical death is thus followed by brain death, persistent vegetative state or locked in syndrome. Animal experiments demonstrate that optimal resuscitation methods can restore electrophysiological and metabolic functions as well as morphology of the brain even after total brain ischemia lasting up to 30 minutes.
These results lead to the possibility to prolong the period of clinical death after the development of new effective methods of cerebrocardiorespiratory resuscitation.