Dr. Jeffrey GladdenFounder & CEO of Gladden Longevity

Rapid Cooling Techniques

20 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief dialogue, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains why children are a primary focus for therapeutic hypothermia research, citing their higher surface‑area‑to‑volume ratio which enables faster heat loss and rapid metabolic slowdown. He outlines the historical progression of cooling methods—from simple ice baths to circulating icy water around the patient—and introduces the emerging concept of liquid ventilation, where a saline or oxygen‑bearing solution is pumped into the lungs to exploit the lung’s massive surface area for rapid heat extraction. The goal of these innovations is to achieve swift metabolic suppression, improving outcomes in critical care scenarios where delayed cooling worsens injury.

It tends to be, as you said, children because they have a higher surface area to volume ratio, so they cool more rapidly. Right. So it slows metabolism fast. So that's really the whole point is we want to slow metabolism as quickly as possible because the faster that's running, the worse things are happening. So we do, we're doing research into ways of finding faster ways of cooling people. So it used to be people would just be put in an ice bath. That wasn't very effective. Then we circulate the icy water around the patient. Now we're actually researching something called liquid ventilation.
Mm-hmm.
Which involves pumping either a saline solution or another sort of oxygen-bearing medium through the body into the lungs because it has a massive surface area and can cool a patient very rapidly. So that's something we're hoping to introduce to accelerate the cooling.