The use of cold as a therapeutic agent has a long and colorful history. The Edwin Smith Papyrus, the most ancient medical text known, dated 3500 B.C., made numerous references to the use of cold as therapy. Baron de Larrey, a French army surgeon during Napoleon's Russian campaign, packed the limbs in ice prior to amputations to render the procedures painless. In the early twentieth century, a neurosurgeon, Temple Fay, pioneered "human refrigeration" as a treatment for malignancies and head injuries. In 1961, Irving Cooper developed the first closed cryoprobe system and ushered in the modern era of cryogenic surgery with his imperturbable convictions. Fay's early work fell victim to the disruptive sequel of the World War II. The Nazis confiscated his data (presented before the Third International Cancer Congress in 1939) forwarded to Belgium for publication and brutally applied his refrigeration techniques experimentally without any benefit of anesthesia in the concentration camps, especially Dachau. Hypothermia became associated in the public mind with the atrocities exposed at the war trials in Nürnberg. After lying dormant for decades, the interest was rekindled in the late 80s when mild hypothermia was shown to confer dramatic neuroprotection in a number of experimental models of brain injury. With several large multi-center clinical studies currently under way, hypothermia is receiving unprecedented attention from the medical and scientific communities.

GA could be a potential biomarker to predict the effects of dual and single antiplatelet therapy in patients with minor stroke or TIA.

We report a case of a 69-year-old white female who presented with a large left internal carotid artery occlusive stroke from a cardiogenic embolus. She was enrolled in an institutional study using a specially designed cooling helmet. Bilateral intracranial pressure (ICP) and temperature probes were placed to determine if there was any differential cooling and ICP compartmentalization between the two hemispheres. We demonstrated a significant temperature gradient between the infarcted and the non-infarcted hemisphere. A significant inter-hemispheric ICP gradient was also observed. We believe that this is the first demonstration of preferential cooling of the infarcted hemisphere over the non-infarcted hemisphere with regional surface hypothermia.