Study on Optimal Temperature During Cardiopulmonary Bypass (THERMIC-4)

When you have certain types of heart surgery, doctors use a special machine called a heart-lung machine. This machine takes over the work of your heart and lungs, making sure your body and organs still get the blood and oxygen they need during the operation. For a long time, it's been common practice to cool down your body during this process. This is because some doctors believe that a cooler body needs less oxygen, which could protect your brain and other organs.

However, in recent years, some doctors have started to question if cooling is always necessary. They believe that keeping your body at a normal temperature might be just as safe, and potentially even better, for some patients. Despite these questions, most heart surgeons in the UK still choose to cool patients down. This study wants to find out if keeping your body at a normal temperature during heart surgery is a safe and good alternative to cooling it down.

This study is the first step in answering that big question. We will involve 100 adult patients across 10 different hospitals in the UK. Half of these patients will be kept at a normal body temperature during their surgery, and the other half will be cooled down as is traditionally done. Importantly, this initial study isn't designed to give a final answer on which method is best. Instead, it's a 'feasibility' study which means we want to see if it's practical to run a much bigger study later on. We'll check how easy it is to invite patients to take part, and how well we can stick to the different temperature plans. We'll also gather early information on how patients recover and how they feel after the surgery, including their quality of life.