‘Neural tourniquet’ controls bleeding with nerve stimulation. Applying non-invasive electrical stimulation to a major nerve that runs from the brain to the body might help to promote clotting.

From the article:

>Forget the gauze and bandages: [electrical stimulation](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01636-x) near the ear might help to reduce bleeding. Researchers hope the technique could one day be used before surgery, [childbirth and other events that pose a risk of dangerously uncontrolled bleeding](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02466-7).

>The treatment, called a ‘neural tourniquet’ by its creators, helps to turbocharge the activity of [platelets, which are cell fragments that form blood clots](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03732-9), according to preliminary results presented at the 2024 Society for Neuroscience conference.

>“Anybody who’s worked in the emergency or operating room knows how gruesome it can be to lose somebody to bleeding,” Jared Huston, a trauma surgeon at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, who co-developed the treatment, tells *Nature*. “Bleeding can kill you much faster than sepsis.”

>Haemorrhage, or uncontrolled bleeding, accounts for about 60,000 deaths in the United States each year[^(1)](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03330-4#ref-CR1). To try to reduce that number, Huston and his colleagues are developing a treatment that targets the [vagus nerves](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01636-x)[, which are large networks of nerve fibres that link the body with the brain](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01636-x). Despite its name, the treatment does not work like a typical tourniquet that blocks blood flow to injured appendages. Instead, the electrical pulses help to stimulate the spleen, which stores about one-third of the body’s platelets. The stimulation prods the spleen to ready platelets to form a clot.

I’m the reporter who wrote the story. Happy to answer any questions about the technology, or how I reported the story.