WCAX.COM Local Vermont News, Weather and Sports-Life-saving tourniquet tested

San Antonio, Texas - January 24, 2012

The most common cause of preventable death in the battlefield is bleeding to death. While combat medicine has come a long way in preventing deaths from blast injuries and wounds to arms and legs, groin and trunk injuries are a different story.

"The regular tourniquets can work on the regular part of the limb, but the parts that are way up-- you can't get the compression on. So this is meant to fill that gap," explained Dr. John Kragh, a research orthopedist.

Two years of research yielded the combat-ready clamp. It's made by a North Carolina company and approved by the Food and Drug Administration at the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston. It's a temporary way to keep an injured soldier alive. Time is critical, and this device takes less than two minutes to deploy. Bleeding usually stops in 15 seconds or less. The strap keeps it in place so the wounded warrior can be transported. Surgeons in the 1800s used similar contraptions.

"And so we basically said, 'Well, if the surgeons can do that and the medics need it, why can't the medics use it?'" Kragh said.

The "junctional tourniquet" is the kind of innovation that may help civilian medical care, too. Trunk tourniquets could be used to help trauma victims in ambulances and airlife helicopters. Importantly, the trunk tourniquet is collapsible and weighs less than a pound; easy for a medic to tote around.

This next generation of combat casualty care is now in use by a handful of American troops. More trunk tourniquets are being sent overseas each week.