Case Study of Severe Accidental Hypothermia with Rapid Cooling, Preserved Shivering, and Consciousness with a Summary of Similar Case Reports
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We describe a case of severe accidental hypothermia of a kayaker with preserved consciousness and shivering despite a rectal temperature of 22.9°C following a 50-min immersion in 3°C water with an estimated core temperature cooling rate of 10.6°C/h. Based on survival at sea prediction curves and cooling rates from physiology studies, cold water (eg, 0-5°C) immersion is expected to drop core temperature by 2 to 4°C/h. Furthermore, accidental hypothermia classification systems predict that severely hypothermic patients are usually unconscious and not shivering. The patient in this report rewarmed rapidly at 3.6°C/h with only minimally invasive measures and was discharged fully neurologically intact. In 41 similar cases of survival in moderate to severe hypothermia with core temperatures <32°C due to cold water immersion, cold air exposure, or avalanche burial, mean cooling rates were 4.3±3.3°C/h (range 0.4-10.6°C/h). Including the current patient, shivering was reported in only four cases. We found several other cases of rewarming from moderate to severe hypothermia with only minimally invasive measures. The current and summarized cases lead us to conclude that patients may be at risk of severe hypothermia in <60 min of cold water immersion and that it is possible for severely hypothermic patients to have preserved consciousness, close to normal vital signs, and shivering. Minimally invasive or noninvasive rewarming of patients with severe hypothermia is also possible, especially in those who continue to shiver. Hypothermia management should not necessarily be guided by classification systems or core temperature alone but rather by a careful consideration of the entire clinical picture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".