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Don’t delay new dried plasma treatment

A new medical technique being explored by the Defense Department could dramatically reduce combat deaths due to blood loss, but battlefield medics likely won’t be approved to use it for several years. That’s way too long.

The last decade has witnessed profound advances in combat casualty care, but hemorrhaging remains the leading cause of battlefield fatalities. And while military doctors attending a recent trauma conference touted the 90 percent probability an airman will survive wounds sustained in hostile action, they also pointed out that a current form of “pre-hospital” treatment — fluid infusions — can impede a patient’s ability to form clots and even accelerates bleeding.

The Armed Forces Medical Examiner’s Office reports that 50 percent of all wounded troops who arrived at a field hospital alive but later died came in with injuries doctors deemed potentially survivable. Of those, 80 percent potentially would have survived if they had received dried plasma treatment on the battlefield, officials say.

Plasma is among the clotting agents administered to wounded troops once they’ve been evacuated to a hospital. Military medical experts want to equip medics with a dried plasma product and teach them to administer it in the first moments after an airman sustains traumatic wounds.

The procedure warrants close oversight from the Food and Drug Administration. Through normal channels, clinical trials will take three to five years to complete.

But these aren’t normal circumstances. Since U.S. troops have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, the services have shown they can respond expeditiously when the need is urgent. This is one of those instances. Fielding this promising new trauma treatment must be expedited through the regulatory process as a priority that could save lives on the battlefield. Three to five years is unacceptable.