Hypothermia can help babies with oxygen deficit, scientists find

Babies that have suffered from a lack of oxygen at birth can benefit from being given mild hypothermia.

This is according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which suggests that cooling the bodies of such infants lowers the risk of brain damage, the BBC reports.

Biomedical scientists studied more than 300 full-term babies with oxygen loss and found that those given mild hypothermia were 57 per cent more likely to survive without damage to their brains.

Responding to the research, study leader Dr Denis Azzopardi from Imperial College London said: "[It] gives for the first time irrefutable proof that cooling can be effective in reducing brain damage after birth asphyxia."

He added that while it does not work in every case, there are still a significant proportion of infants who would benefit from being cooled in such circumstances.

The study was given almost £1 million of funding from the Medical Research Council, which exists to improve human health through medical studies