Resuscitation

Emergencies happen anywhere, anytime – and sometimes physicians find themselves in situations where they are the only ones who can help. “Is There a Doctor in the House?” is a new series telling these stories.

When the plane crashed, I was asleep. I had arrived the evening before with my wife and three sons at a house on Kezar Lake on the Maine–New Hampshire border. We were going to spend a week there with my wife’s four brothers and their families. I was woken by people screaming my name. I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs. My kids had been watching a float plane circling and gliding along the lake. It had crashed into the water and flipped upside down. My oldest brother-in-law jumped into his ski boat and we sped out to the scene.

All we can see are the plane’s pontoons. The rest is underwater. A woman has already surfaced, screaming. I dive in.

I find the woman’s husband and 3-year-old son struggling to get free from the plane through the smashed windshield. They manage to get to the surface. The pilot is dead, impaled through the chest by the left wing strut.

The big problem: A little girl, whom I would learn later is named Lauren, remained trapped. The water is murky but I can see her, a 5- or 6-year-old girl with this long hair, strapped in upside down and unconscious.

The mom and I dive down over and over, pulling and ripping at the door. We cannot get it open. Finally, I’m able to bend the door open enough where I can reach in, but I can’t undo the seatbelt. In my mind, I’m debating, should I try and go through the front windshield? I’m getting really tired, I can tell there’s fuel in the water, and I don’t want to drown in the plane. So I pop up to the surface and yell, “Does anyone have a knife?”

My brother-in-law shoots back to shore in the boat, screaming, “Get a knife!” My niece gets in the boat with one. I’m standing on the pontoon, and my niece is in the front of the boat calling, “Uncle Todd! Uncle Todd!” and she throws the knife. It goes way over my head. I can’t even jump for it, it’s so high.

I have to get the knife. So, I dive into the water to try and find it. Somehow, the black knife has landed on the white wing, 4 or 5 feet under the water. Pure luck. It could have sunk down a hundred feet into the lake. I grab the knife and hand it to the mom, Beth. She’s able to cut the seatbelt, and we both pull Lauren to the surface.

I lay her out on the pontoon. She has no pulse and her pupils are fixed and dilated. Her mom is yelling, “She’s dead, isn’t she?” I start CPR. My skin and eyes are burning from the airplane fuel in the water. I get her breathing, and her heart comes back very quickly. Lauren starts to vomit and I’m trying to keep her airway clear. She’s breathing spontaneously and she has a pulse, so I decide it’s time to move her to shore.

We pull the boat up to the dock and Lauren’s now having anoxic seizures. Her brain has been without oxygen, and now she’s getting perfused again. We get her to shore and lay her on the lawn. I’m still doing mouth-to-mouth, but she’s seizing like crazy, and I don’t have any way to control that. Beth is crying and wants to hold her daughter gently while I’m working.

Someone had called 911, and finally this dude shows up with an ambulance, and it’s like something out of World War II. All he has is an oxygen tank, but the mask is old and cracked. It’s too big for Lauren, but it sort of fits me, so I’m sucking in oxygen and blowing it into the girl’s mouth. I’m doing whatever I can, but I don’t have an IV to start. I have no fluids. I got nothing.

As it happens, I’d done my emergency medicine training at Maine Medical Center, so I tell someone to call them and get a Life Flight chopper. We have to drive somewhere where the chopper can land, so we take the ambulance to the parking lot of the closest store called the Wicked Good Store. That’s a common thing in Maine. Everything is “wicked good.”

The whole town is there by that point. The chopper arrives. The ambulance doors pop open and a woman says, “Todd?” And I say, “Heather?”

Heather is an emergency flight nurse whom I’d trained with many years ago. There’s immediate trust. She has all the right equipment. We put in breathing tubes and IVs. We stop Lauren from seizing. The kid is soon stable.

There is only one extra seat in the chopper, so I tell Beth to go. They take off.

Suddenly, I begin to doubt my decision. Lauren had been underwater for 15 minutes at minimum. I know how long that is. Did I do the right thing? Did I resuscitate a brain-dead child? I didn’t think about it at the time, but if that patient had come to me in the emergency department, I’m honestly not sure what I would have done.

So, I go home. And I don’t get a call. The FAA and sheriff arrive to take statements from us. I don’t hear from anyone.

The next day I start calling. No one will tell me anything, so I finally get to one of the pediatric ICU attendings who had trained me. He says Lauren literally woke up and said, “I have to go pee.” And that was it. She was 100% normal. I couldn’t believe it.

Here’s a theory: In kids, there’s something called the glottic reflex. I think her glottic reflex went off as soon as she hit the water, which basically closed her airway. So when she passed out, she could never get enough water in her lungs and still had enough air in there to keep her alive. Later, I got a call from her uncle. He could barely get the words out because he was in tears. He said Lauren was doing beautifully.  

Three days later, I drove to Lauren’s house with my wife and kids. I had her read to me. I watched her play on the jungle gym for motor function. All sorts of stuff. She was totally normal.

Beth told us that the night before the accident, her mother had given the women in her family what she called a “miracle bracelet,” a bracelet that is supposed to give you one miracle in your life. Beth said she had the bracelet on her wrist the day of the accident, and now it’s gone. “Saving Lauren’s life was my miracle,” she said.

Funny thing: For 20 years, I ran all the EMS, police, fire, ambulance, in Boulder, Colo., where I live. I wrote all the protocols, and I would never advise any of my paramedics to dive into jet fuel to save someone. That was risky. But at the time, it was totally automatic. I think it taught me not to give up in certain situations, because you really don’t know.

Dr. Dorfman is an emergency medicine physician in Boulder, Colo., and medical director at Cedalion Health.
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Emergencies happen anywhere, anytime – and sometimes physicians find themselves in situations where they are the only ones who can help. “Is There a Doctor in the House?” is a new series telling these stories.

When the plane crashed, I was asleep. I had arrived the evening before with my wife and three sons at a house on Kezar Lake on the Maine–New Hampshire border. We were going to spend a week there with my wife’s four brothers and their families. I was woken by people screaming my name. I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs. My kids had been watching a float plane circling and gliding along the lake. It had crashed into the water and flipped upside down. My oldest brother-in-law jumped into his ski boat and we sped out to the scene.

All we can see are the plane’s pontoons. The rest is underwater. A woman has already surfaced, screaming. I dive in.

I find the woman’s husband and 3-year-old son struggling to get free from the plane through the smashed windshield. They manage to get to the surface. The pilot is dead, impaled through the chest by the left wing strut.

The big problem: A little girl, whom I would learn later is named Lauren, remained trapped. The water is murky but I can see her, a 5- or 6-year-old girl with this long hair, strapped in upside down and unconscious.

The mom and I dive down over and over, pulling and ripping at the door. We cannot get it open. Finally, I’m able to bend the door open enough where I can reach in, but I can’t undo the seatbelt. In my mind, I’m debating, should I try and go through the front windshield? I’m getting really tired, I can tell there’s fuel in the water, and I don’t want to drown in the plane. So I pop up to the surface and yell, “Does anyone have a knife?”

My brother-in-law shoots back to shore in the boat, screaming, “Get a knife!” My niece gets in the boat with one. I’m standing on the pontoon, and my niece is in the front of the boat calling, “Uncle Todd! Uncle Todd!” and she throws the knife. It goes way over my head. I can’t even jump for it, it’s so high.

I have to get the knife. So, I dive into the water to try and find it. Somehow, the black knife has landed on the white wing, 4 or 5 feet under the water. Pure luck. It could have sunk down a hundred feet into the lake. I grab the knife and hand it to the mom, Beth. She’s able to cut the seatbelt, and we both pull Lauren to the surface.

I lay her out on the pontoon. She has no pulse and her pupils are fixed and dilated. Her mom is yelling, “She’s dead, isn’t she?” I start CPR. My skin and eyes are burning from the airplane fuel in the water. I get her breathing, and her heart comes back very quickly. Lauren starts to vomit and I’m trying to keep her airway clear. She’s breathing spontaneously and she has a pulse, so I decide it’s time to move her to shore.

We pull the boat up to the dock and Lauren’s now having anoxic seizures. Her brain has been without oxygen, and now she’s getting perfused again. We get her to shore and lay her on the lawn. I’m still doing mouth-to-mouth, but she’s seizing like crazy, and I don’t have any way to control that. Beth is crying and wants to hold her daughter gently while I’m working.

Someone had called 911, and finally this dude shows up with an ambulance, and it’s like something out of World War II. All he has is an oxygen tank, but the mask is old and cracked. It’s too big for Lauren, but it sort of fits me, so I’m sucking in oxygen and blowing it into the girl’s mouth. I’m doing whatever I can, but I don’t have an IV to start. I have no fluids. I got nothing.

As it happens, I’d done my emergency medicine training at Maine Medical Center, so I tell someone to call them and get a Life Flight chopper. We have to drive somewhere where the chopper can land, so we take the ambulance to the parking lot of the closest store called the Wicked Good Store. That’s a common thing in Maine. Everything is “wicked good.”

The whole town is there by that point. The chopper arrives. The ambulance doors pop open and a woman says, “Todd?” And I say, “Heather?”

Heather is an emergency flight nurse whom I’d trained with many years ago. There’s immediate trust. She has all the right equipment. We put in breathing tubes and IVs. We stop Lauren from seizing. The kid is soon stable.

There is only one extra seat in the chopper, so I tell Beth to go. They take off.

Suddenly, I begin to doubt my decision. Lauren had been underwater for 15 minutes at minimum. I know how long that is. Did I do the right thing? Did I resuscitate a brain-dead child? I didn’t think about it at the time, but if that patient had come to me in the emergency department, I’m honestly not sure what I would have done.

So, I go home. And I don’t get a call. The FAA and sheriff arrive to take statements from us. I don’t hear from anyone.

The next day I start calling. No one will tell me anything, so I finally get to one of the pediatric ICU attendings who had trained me. He says Lauren literally woke up and said, “I have to go pee.” And that was it. She was 100% normal. I couldn’t believe it.

Here’s a theory: In kids, there’s something called the glottic reflex. I think her glottic reflex went off as soon as she hit the water, which basically closed her airway. So when she passed out, she could never get enough water in her lungs and still had enough air in there to keep her alive. Later, I got a call from her uncle. He could barely get the words out because he was in tears. He said Lauren was doing beautifully.  

Three days later, I drove to Lauren’s house with my wife and kids. I had her read to me. I watched her play on the jungle gym for motor function. All sorts of stuff. She was totally normal.

Beth told us that the night before the accident, her mother had given the women in her family what she called a “miracle bracelet,” a bracelet that is supposed to give you one miracle in your life. Beth said she had the bracelet on her wrist the day of the accident, and now it’s gone. “Saving Lauren’s life was my miracle,” she said.

Funny thing: For 20 years, I ran all the EMS, police, fire, ambulance, in Boulder, Colo., where I live. I wrote all the protocols, and I would never advise any of my paramedics to dive into jet fuel to save someone. That was risky. But at the time, it was totally automatic. I think it taught me not to give up in certain situations, because you really don’t know.

Dr. Dorfman is an emergency medicine physician in Boulder, Colo., and medical director at Cedalion Health.
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Emergencies happen anywhere, anytime – and sometimes physicians find themselves in situations where they are the only ones who can help. “Is There a Doctor in the House?” is a new series telling these stories.

When the plane crashed, I was asleep. I had arrived the evening before with my wife and three sons at a house on Kezar Lake on the Maine–New Hampshire border. We were going to spend a week there with my wife’s four brothers and their families. I was woken by people screaming my name. I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs. My kids had been watching a float plane circling and gliding along the lake. It had crashed into the water and flipped upside down. My oldest brother-in-law jumped into his ski boat and we sped out to the scene.

All we can see are the plane’s pontoons. The rest is underwater. A woman has already surfaced, screaming. I dive in.

I find the woman’s husband and 3-year-old son struggling to get free from the plane through the smashed windshield. They manage to get to the surface. The pilot is dead, impaled through the chest by the left wing strut.

The big problem: A little girl, whom I would learn later is named Lauren, remained trapped. The water is murky but I can see her, a 5- or 6-year-old girl with this long hair, strapped in upside down and unconscious.

The mom and I dive down over and over, pulling and ripping at the door. We cannot get it open. Finally, I’m able to bend the door open enough where I can reach in, but I can’t undo the seatbelt. In my mind, I’m debating, should I try and go through the front windshield? I’m getting really tired, I can tell there’s fuel in the water, and I don’t want to drown in the plane. So I pop up to the surface and yell, “Does anyone have a knife?”

My brother-in-law shoots back to shore in the boat, screaming, “Get a knife!” My niece gets in the boat with one. I’m standing on the pontoon, and my niece is in the front of the boat calling, “Uncle Todd! Uncle Todd!” and she throws the knife. It goes way over my head. I can’t even jump for it, it’s so high.

I have to get the knife. So, I dive into the water to try and find it. Somehow, the black knife has landed on the white wing, 4 or 5 feet under the water. Pure luck. It could have sunk down a hundred feet into the lake. I grab the knife and hand it to the mom, Beth. She’s able to cut the seatbelt, and we both pull Lauren to the surface.

I lay her out on the pontoon. She has no pulse and her pupils are fixed and dilated. Her mom is yelling, “She’s dead, isn’t she?” I start CPR. My skin and eyes are burning from the airplane fuel in the water. I get her breathing, and her heart comes back very quickly. Lauren starts to vomit and I’m trying to keep her airway clear. She’s breathing spontaneously and she has a pulse, so I decide it’s time to move her to shore.

We pull the boat up to the dock and Lauren’s now having anoxic seizures. Her brain has been without oxygen, and now she’s getting perfused again. We get her to shore and lay her on the lawn. I’m still doing mouth-to-mouth, but she’s seizing like crazy, and I don’t have any way to control that. Beth is crying and wants to hold her daughter gently while I’m working.

Someone had called 911, and finally this dude shows up with an ambulance, and it’s like something out of World War II. All he has is an oxygen tank, but the mask is old and cracked. It’s too big for Lauren, but it sort of fits me, so I’m sucking in oxygen and blowing it into the girl’s mouth. I’m doing whatever I can, but I don’t have an IV to start. I have no fluids. I got nothing.

As it happens, I’d done my emergency medicine training at Maine Medical Center, so I tell someone to call them and get a Life Flight chopper. We have to drive somewhere where the chopper can land, so we take the ambulance to the parking lot of the closest store called the Wicked Good Store. That’s a common thing in Maine. Everything is “wicked good.”

The whole town is there by that point. The chopper arrives. The ambulance doors pop open and a woman says, “Todd?” And I say, “Heather?”

Heather is an emergency flight nurse whom I’d trained with many years ago. There’s immediate trust. She has all the right equipment. We put in breathing tubes and IVs. We stop Lauren from seizing. The kid is soon stable.

There is only one extra seat in the chopper, so I tell Beth to go. They take off.

Suddenly, I begin to doubt my decision. Lauren had been underwater for 15 minutes at minimum. I know how long that is. Did I do the right thing? Did I resuscitate a brain-dead child? I didn’t think about it at the time, but if that patient had come to me in the emergency department, I’m honestly not sure what I would have done.

So, I go home. And I don’t get a call. The FAA and sheriff arrive to take statements from us. I don’t hear from anyone.

The next day I start calling. No one will tell me anything, so I finally get to one of the pediatric ICU attendings who had trained me. He says Lauren literally woke up and said, “I have to go pee.” And that was it. She was 100% normal. I couldn’t believe it.

Here’s a theory: In kids, there’s something called the glottic reflex. I think her glottic reflex went off as soon as she hit the water, which basically closed her airway. So when she passed out, she could never get enough water in her lungs and still had enough air in there to keep her alive. Later, I got a call from her uncle. He could barely get the words out because he was in tears. He said Lauren was doing beautifully.  

Three days later, I drove to Lauren’s house with my wife and kids. I had her read to me. I watched her play on the jungle gym for motor function. All sorts of stuff. She was totally normal.

Beth told us that the night before the accident, her mother had given the women in her family what she called a “miracle bracelet,” a bracelet that is supposed to give you one miracle in your life. Beth said she had the bracelet on her wrist the day of the accident, and now it’s gone. “Saving Lauren’s life was my miracle,” she said.

Funny thing: For 20 years, I ran all the EMS, police, fire, ambulance, in Boulder, Colo., where I live. I wrote all the protocols, and I would never advise any of my paramedics to dive into jet fuel to save someone. That was risky. But at the time, it was totally automatic. I think it taught me not to give up in certain situations, because you really don’t know.

Dr. Dorfman is an emergency medicine physician in Boulder, Colo., and medical director at Cedalion Health.
 

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Brain wave recordings obtained during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) offer support to near-death experiences subjectively reported by some people who survive cardiac arrest, according to a novel new study.

“These recalled experiences and brain wave changes may be the first signs of the so-called ‘near-death’ experience, and we have captured them for the first time in a large study,” lead investigator Sam Parnia, MD, PhD, with NYU Langone Health, said in a news release.

Identifying measurable electrical signs of lucid and heightened brain activity during CPR, coupled with stories of recalled near-death experiences, suggests that the human sense of self and consciousness, much like other biological body functions, may not stop completely around the time of death, Dr. Parnia added.

He presented the findings Nov. 6 at a resuscitation science symposium at the American Heart Association scientific sessions.
 

The AWARE II study

“For years, some people in cardiac arrest have reported being lucid, often with a heightened sense of consciousness, while seemingly unconscious and on the brink of death,” Dr. Parnia noted in an interview.

“Yet, no one’s ever be able to prove it and a lot of people have dismissed these experiences, thinking it’s all just a trick on the brain,” Dr. Parnia said.

In a first-of-its-kind study, Dr. Parnia and colleagues examined consciousness and its underlying electrocortical biomarkers during CPR for in-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA).

They incorporated independent audiovisual testing of awareness with continuous real-time EEG and cerebral oxygenation (rSO₂) monitoring into CPR.

Only 53 of the 567 IHCA patients survived (9.3%). Among the 28 (52.8%) IHCA survivors who completed interviews, 11 (39.3%) reported unique, lucid experiences during resuscitation.

These experiences included a perception of separation from one’s body, observing events without pain or distress, and an awareness and meaningful evaluation of life, including of their actions, intentions, and thoughts toward others.

“These lucid experiences of death are not hallucinations or delusions. They cannot be considered a trick of a disordered or dying brain, but rather a unique human experience that emerges on the brink of death,” Dr. Parnia said. 

And what’s “fascinating,” he added, is that despite marked cerebral ischemia (mean regional oxygen saturation [rSO₂]  43%), near-normal/physiologic EEG activity (gamma, delta, theta, alpha, and beta rhythms) consistent with consciousness and a possible resumption of a network-level of cognitive and neuronal activity emerged for as long as 35-60 minutes into CPR.

Some of these brain waves normally occur when people are conscious and performing higher mental functions, including thinking, memory retrieval, and conscious perception, he said.
 

‘Seismic shift’ in understanding of death

This is the first time such biomarkers of consciousness have been identified during cardiac arrest and CPR, Dr. Parnia said.

He said further study is needed to more precisely define biomarkers of what is considered to be clinical consciousness and the recalled experience of death, and to monitor the long-term psychological effects of resuscitation after cardiac arrest.

“Our understanding of death has gone through a seismic shift in the last few years,” he said.

“The biological discoveries around death and the postmortem period are completely different to the social conventions that we have about death. That is, we perceive of death as being the end, but actually what we’re finding is that brain cells don’t die immediately. They die very slowly over many hours of time,” Dr. Parnia noted.

Reached for comment, Ajmal Zemmar, MD, PhD, of University of Louisville (Ky.), noted that several studies, including this one, “challenge the traditional way that we think of death – that when the heart stops beating that’s when we die.”

The observation that during cardiac arrest and CPR, the brain waves are still normal for up to an hour is “fairly remarkable,” Dr. Zemmar told this news organization.

“However, whether there is conscious perception or not is very hard to answer,” he cautioned. 

“This type of research tries to bridge the objective EEG recordings with the subjective description you get from the patient, but it’s hard to know when conscious perception stops,” he said.

Funding and support for the study were provided by NYU Langone Health, The John Templeton Foundation, and the UK Resuscitation Council, and National Institutes for Health Research. Dr. Parnia and Dr. Zemmar reported no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Brain wave recordings obtained during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) offer support to near-death experiences subjectively reported by some people who survive cardiac arrest, according to a novel new study.

“These recalled experiences and brain wave changes may be the first signs of the so-called ‘near-death’ experience, and we have captured them for the first time in a large study,” lead investigator Sam Parnia, MD, PhD, with NYU Langone Health, said in a news release.

Identifying measurable electrical signs of lucid and heightened brain activity during CPR, coupled with stories of recalled near-death experiences, suggests that the human sense of self and consciousness, much like other biological body functions, may not stop completely around the time of death, Dr. Parnia added.

He presented the findings Nov. 6 at a resuscitation science symposium at the American Heart Association scientific sessions.
 

The AWARE II study

“For years, some people in cardiac arrest have reported being lucid, often with a heightened sense of consciousness, while seemingly unconscious and on the brink of death,” Dr. Parnia noted in an interview.

“Yet, no one’s ever be able to prove it and a lot of people have dismissed these experiences, thinking it’s all just a trick on the brain,” Dr. Parnia said.

In a first-of-its-kind study, Dr. Parnia and colleagues examined consciousness and its underlying electrocortical biomarkers during CPR for in-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA).

They incorporated independent audiovisual testing of awareness with continuous real-time EEG and cerebral oxygenation (rSO₂) monitoring into CPR.

Only 53 of the 567 IHCA patients survived (9.3%). Among the 28 (52.8%) IHCA survivors who completed interviews, 11 (39.3%) reported unique, lucid experiences during resuscitation.

These experiences included a perception of separation from one’s body, observing events without pain or distress, and an awareness and meaningful evaluation of life, including of their actions, intentions, and thoughts toward others.

“These lucid experiences of death are not hallucinations or delusions. They cannot be considered a trick of a disordered or dying brain, but rather a unique human experience that emerges on the brink of death,” Dr. Parnia said. 

And what’s “fascinating,” he added, is that despite marked cerebral ischemia (mean regional oxygen saturation [rSO₂]  43%), near-normal/physiologic EEG activity (gamma, delta, theta, alpha, and beta rhythms) consistent with consciousness and a possible resumption of a network-level of cognitive and neuronal activity emerged for as long as 35-60 minutes into CPR.

Some of these brain waves normally occur when people are conscious and performing higher mental functions, including thinking, memory retrieval, and conscious perception, he said.
 

‘Seismic shift’ in understanding of death

This is the first time such biomarkers of consciousness have been identified during cardiac arrest and CPR, Dr. Parnia said.

He said further study is needed to more precisely define biomarkers of what is considered to be clinical consciousness and the recalled experience of death, and to monitor the long-term psychological effects of resuscitation after cardiac arrest.

“Our understanding of death has gone through a seismic shift in the last few years,” he said.

“The biological discoveries around death and the postmortem period are completely different to the social conventions that we have about death. That is, we perceive of death as being the end, but actually what we’re finding is that brain cells don’t die immediately. They die very slowly over many hours of time,” Dr. Parnia noted.

Reached for comment, Ajmal Zemmar, MD, PhD, of University of Louisville (Ky.), noted that several studies, including this one, “challenge the traditional way that we think of death – that when the heart stops beating that’s when we die.”

The observation that during cardiac arrest and CPR, the brain waves are still normal for up to an hour is “fairly remarkable,” Dr. Zemmar told this news organization.

“However, whether there is conscious perception or not is very hard to answer,” he cautioned. 

“This type of research tries to bridge the objective EEG recordings with the subjective description you get from the patient, but it’s hard to know when conscious perception stops,” he said.

Funding and support for the study were provided by NYU Langone Health, The John Templeton Foundation, and the UK Resuscitation Council, and National Institutes for Health Research. Dr. Parnia and Dr. Zemmar reported no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Brain wave recordings obtained during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) offer support to near-death experiences subjectively reported by some people who survive cardiac arrest, according to a novel new study.

“These recalled experiences and brain wave changes may be the first signs of the so-called ‘near-death’ experience, and we have captured them for the first time in a large study,” lead investigator Sam Parnia, MD, PhD, with NYU Langone Health, said in a news release.

Identifying measurable electrical signs of lucid and heightened brain activity during CPR, coupled with stories of recalled near-death experiences, suggests that the human sense of self and consciousness, much like other biological body functions, may not stop completely around the time of death, Dr. Parnia added.

He presented the findings Nov. 6 at a resuscitation science symposium at the American Heart Association scientific sessions.
 

The AWARE II study

“For years, some people in cardiac arrest have reported being lucid, often with a heightened sense of consciousness, while seemingly unconscious and on the brink of death,” Dr. Parnia noted in an interview.

“Yet, no one’s ever be able to prove it and a lot of people have dismissed these experiences, thinking it’s all just a trick on the brain,” Dr. Parnia said.

In a first-of-its-kind study, Dr. Parnia and colleagues examined consciousness and its underlying electrocortical biomarkers during CPR for in-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA).

They incorporated independent audiovisual testing of awareness with continuous real-time EEG and cerebral oxygenation (rSO₂) monitoring into CPR.

Only 53 of the 567 IHCA patients survived (9.3%). Among the 28 (52.8%) IHCA survivors who completed interviews, 11 (39.3%) reported unique, lucid experiences during resuscitation.

These experiences included a perception of separation from one’s body, observing events without pain or distress, and an awareness and meaningful evaluation of life, including of their actions, intentions, and thoughts toward others.

“These lucid experiences of death are not hallucinations or delusions. They cannot be considered a trick of a disordered or dying brain, but rather a unique human experience that emerges on the brink of death,” Dr. Parnia said. 

And what’s “fascinating,” he added, is that despite marked cerebral ischemia (mean regional oxygen saturation [rSO₂]  43%), near-normal/physiologic EEG activity (gamma, delta, theta, alpha, and beta rhythms) consistent with consciousness and a possible resumption of a network-level of cognitive and neuronal activity emerged for as long as 35-60 minutes into CPR.

Some of these brain waves normally occur when people are conscious and performing higher mental functions, including thinking, memory retrieval, and conscious perception, he said.
 

‘Seismic shift’ in understanding of death

This is the first time such biomarkers of consciousness have been identified during cardiac arrest and CPR, Dr. Parnia said.

He said further study is needed to more precisely define biomarkers of what is considered to be clinical consciousness and the recalled experience of death, and to monitor the long-term psychological effects of resuscitation after cardiac arrest.

“Our understanding of death has gone through a seismic shift in the last few years,” he said.

“The biological discoveries around death and the postmortem period are completely different to the social conventions that we have about death. That is, we perceive of death as being the end, but actually what we’re finding is that brain cells don’t die immediately. They die very slowly over many hours of time,” Dr. Parnia noted.

Reached for comment, Ajmal Zemmar, MD, PhD, of University of Louisville (Ky.), noted that several studies, including this one, “challenge the traditional way that we think of death – that when the heart stops beating that’s when we die.”

The observation that during cardiac arrest and CPR, the brain waves are still normal for up to an hour is “fairly remarkable,” Dr. Zemmar told this news organization.

“However, whether there is conscious perception or not is very hard to answer,” he cautioned. 

“This type of research tries to bridge the objective EEG recordings with the subjective description you get from the patient, but it’s hard to know when conscious perception stops,” he said.

Funding and support for the study were provided by NYU Langone Health, The John Templeton Foundation, and the UK Resuscitation Council, and National Institutes for Health Research. Dr. Parnia and Dr. Zemmar reported no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

ANAHEIM, CALIF. – Opioids are the most common cause of fatal poisonings in young children, and their contribution to children’s deaths has been increasing, according to research presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference.

The study found that the proportion of deaths in U.S. children linked to opioids has doubled since the mid-2000s, tracking the course of the epidemic in adults in this country.

“What is striking about our study is how the opioid epidemic has not spared our nation’s infants or young children,” Christopher Gaw, MD, MA, a pediatric emergency medicine fellow physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said in an interview. “There is important work being done to reduce unnecessary opioid prescribing, drug diversion, and treatment of substance use disorders. These efforts – though not directly related to children – also help protect them, since they can reduce the chance of exposure to opioids in the home.”

Dr. Gaw and his colleagues analyzed data in Child Death Reviews from 40 states that participate in the National Fatality Review Case Reporting System, focusing on children aged 5 years and younger who died from a poisoning between 2005 and 2018. During that time, 731 child poisoning deaths were reported to the system – of which nearly half (47%) involved opioids as the poisoning agent – up from 24% in 2005. More than 4 in 10 deaths (42%) involved children under age 1.

Most of the deaths (61%) occurred in the child’s home, and in even more cases (71%) the child was being supervised when the poisoning occurred, most often by a parent (58.5%). The others supervising children were usually a grandparent (11%) or another relative (5.5%). The child was in view of the supervising individual in 28.5% of the deaths. A child protective services case was opened in 13% of the cases.

“Supervising a child is hard. Kids are constantly exploring and moving,” Dr. Gaw said. “A child may find a dropped medication on the floor that a caregiver doesn’t see, or a child may get into a bag or a purse when a caregiver is looking the other way. Poisonings can happen in a split second.”

Expecting caregivers to be able to watch kids every moment and always be within arm’s reach to prevent an accident is unrealistic, Dr. Gaw said, so families should focus on preparedness.

“Young children can’t tell the difference between a deadly substance versus a substance that is harmless or would only cause some harm. The best way to protect children is to prevent the poisoning from happening in the first place,” Dr. Gaw said. ”

It is recommended that caregivers keep the Poison Control Center’s national 24/7 hotline in their phones: (800) 222-1222.

Two-thirds of the cases Dr. Gaw examined did not involve a call to a poison control center, but most did involve a call to 911.

“My guess is that caregivers likely called 911 instead of poison control because the child was likely critically ill or deceased when found,” Dr. Gaw said, noting that his group did not have access to descriptive information about 911 calls. “If a child is critically ill and a caregiver called poison control first, they would be referred to 911.”

If a child looks healthy but has just swallowed something dangerous or deadly, Dr. Gaw said poison control can guide the family to getting prompt medical attention that could be lifesaving.

“We don’t expect the public to know what substances are harmless, harmful, or deadly,” he said. “People should always call poison control if there is any concern, even if the child looks well.”

Some poison control centers are working to increase the ways people can reach them, including through texting, apps, or online chat, he added.

Gary A. Smith, MD, DrPH, president of the nonprofit Child Injury Prevention Alliance in Columbus, Ohio, and director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, said the high level of supervision in these cases was not surprising.

”We have shown that most children are being directly supervised at the moment of injury for baby walker–related injuries, firework-related injuries, and other types of injuries that we have studied,” Dr. Smith said in an interview. “Injuries happen quickly and generally do not give a parent or caregiver time to react.”

“This dispels the myth that parental supervision is the key to injury prevention,” Dr. Smith said. “Although supervision helps, it is not adequate. These injuries occur to children of good and caring parents. The message for pediatricians is that we must create safe environments for children and design hazards out of existence to effectively prevent poisoning and other injuries.”

That preventive approach has been used for infectious disease and other public health problems, he added.

“Prescription opioids must be kept in their original containers with children-resistant closures and be stored up, away, and out of sight of children, preferably in a locked location,” Dr. Smith said. “If adults use illicit opioids or any other illicit substances – which are commonly laced with fentanyl – they should not use or store them in the home where children can access them.”

Over-the-counter pain, cold, and allergy medications were the second most common cause of death, occurring in 15% of cases.

“There has been a lot of work over the years among health care providers to counsel families on the proper dosing and use of medications such as Tylenol, Motrin, and Benadryl,” Dr. Gaw said. “There has also been a push to educate families that using antihistamines, such as Benadryl, to sedate their children can be dangerous and, depending on the dose, potentially deadly.”

Another 14% of cases were an unspecified illicit drug, and 10% were an unspecified over-the-counter or prescription medication. Carbon monoxide poisoning made up 6% of cases, and the remaining substances included amphetamines, antidepressants, cocaine, and alcohol.

Over half the deaths in 1-year-olds (61%) and children aged 2-5 (54%) were due to opioid poisoning, as were a third of deaths in infants (34%). Most of the poisonings involving amphetamines (81%), cocaine (84%), and alcohol (61.5%) occurred in infants under age 1.

Dr. Smith said that harm-reduction strategies, such as having naloxone on hand and using fentanyl test strips, can reduce the likelihood of death from illicit drugs.
 

Reducing stigma can save lives

“Referring parents to services for individuals who use drugs is key,” Dr. Smith said. “Treating this as a public health problem without stigmatizing the behavior is something that pediatricians and other health care professionals must remember.” As a resource for other pediatricians, Dr. Gaw noted that CHOP’s poison control center medical director Kevin Osterhoudt, MD produced a 25-minute podcast that covers common causes of poisonings, use of naloxone in children, and prevention tips.

“Naloxone is an effective antidote to opioid poisonings,” Dr. Gaw said. “We often think of using it in adults, but this is also a lifesaving medication for children poisoned by opioids. Educating people on recognizing the signs and symptoms of opioid poisoning and helping them feel empowered to use naloxone is something the public health world is working on.”

Dr. Gaw and Dr. Smith had no relevant disclosures. No external funding was noted for the study.

ANAHEIM, CALIF. – Opioids are the most common cause of fatal poisonings in young children, and their contribution to children’s deaths has been increasing, according to research presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference.

The study found that the proportion of deaths in U.S. children linked to opioids has doubled since the mid-2000s, tracking the course of the epidemic in adults in this country.

“What is striking about our study is how the opioid epidemic has not spared our nation’s infants or young children,” Christopher Gaw, MD, MA, a pediatric emergency medicine fellow physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said in an interview. “There is important work being done to reduce unnecessary opioid prescribing, drug diversion, and treatment of substance use disorders. These efforts – though not directly related to children – also help protect them, since they can reduce the chance of exposure to opioids in the home.”

Dr. Gaw and his colleagues analyzed data in Child Death Reviews from 40 states that participate in the National Fatality Review Case Reporting System, focusing on children aged 5 years and younger who died from a poisoning between 2005 and 2018. During that time, 731 child poisoning deaths were reported to the system – of which nearly half (47%) involved opioids as the poisoning agent – up from 24% in 2005. More than 4 in 10 deaths (42%) involved children under age 1.

Most of the deaths (61%) occurred in the child’s home, and in even more cases (71%) the child was being supervised when the poisoning occurred, most often by a parent (58.5%). The others supervising children were usually a grandparent (11%) or another relative (5.5%). The child was in view of the supervising individual in 28.5% of the deaths. A child protective services case was opened in 13% of the cases.

“Supervising a child is hard. Kids are constantly exploring and moving,” Dr. Gaw said. “A child may find a dropped medication on the floor that a caregiver doesn’t see, or a child may get into a bag or a purse when a caregiver is looking the other way. Poisonings can happen in a split second.”

Expecting caregivers to be able to watch kids every moment and always be within arm’s reach to prevent an accident is unrealistic, Dr. Gaw said, so families should focus on preparedness.

“Young children can’t tell the difference between a deadly substance versus a substance that is harmless or would only cause some harm. The best way to protect children is to prevent the poisoning from happening in the first place,” Dr. Gaw said. ”

It is recommended that caregivers keep the Poison Control Center’s national 24/7 hotline in their phones: (800) 222-1222.

Two-thirds of the cases Dr. Gaw examined did not involve a call to a poison control center, but most did involve a call to 911.

“My guess is that caregivers likely called 911 instead of poison control because the child was likely critically ill or deceased when found,” Dr. Gaw said, noting that his group did not have access to descriptive information about 911 calls. “If a child is critically ill and a caregiver called poison control first, they would be referred to 911.”

If a child looks healthy but has just swallowed something dangerous or deadly, Dr. Gaw said poison control can guide the family to getting prompt medical attention that could be lifesaving.

“We don’t expect the public to know what substances are harmless, harmful, or deadly,” he said. “People should always call poison control if there is any concern, even if the child looks well.”

Some poison control centers are working to increase the ways people can reach them, including through texting, apps, or online chat, he added.

Gary A. Smith, MD, DrPH, president of the nonprofit Child Injury Prevention Alliance in Columbus, Ohio, and director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, said the high level of supervision in these cases was not surprising.

”We have shown that most children are being directly supervised at the moment of injury for baby walker–related injuries, firework-related injuries, and other types of injuries that we have studied,” Dr. Smith said in an interview. “Injuries happen quickly and generally do not give a parent or caregiver time to react.”

“This dispels the myth that parental supervision is the key to injury prevention,” Dr. Smith said. “Although supervision helps, it is not adequate. These injuries occur to children of good and caring parents. The message for pediatricians is that we must create safe environments for children and design hazards out of existence to effectively prevent poisoning and other injuries.”

That preventive approach has been used for infectious disease and other public health problems, he added.

“Prescription opioids must be kept in their original containers with children-resistant closures and be stored up, away, and out of sight of children, preferably in a locked location,” Dr. Smith said. “If adults use illicit opioids or any other illicit substances – which are commonly laced with fentanyl – they should not use or store them in the home where children can access them.”

Over-the-counter pain, cold, and allergy medications were the second most common cause of death, occurring in 15% of cases.

“There has been a lot of work over the years among health care providers to counsel families on the proper dosing and use of medications such as Tylenol, Motrin, and Benadryl,” Dr. Gaw said. “There has also been a push to educate families that using antihistamines, such as Benadryl, to sedate their children can be dangerous and, depending on the dose, potentially deadly.”

Another 14% of cases were an unspecified illicit drug, and 10% were an unspecified over-the-counter or prescription medication. Carbon monoxide poisoning made up 6% of cases, and the remaining substances included amphetamines, antidepressants, cocaine, and alcohol.

Over half the deaths in 1-year-olds (61%) and children aged 2-5 (54%) were due to opioid poisoning, as were a third of deaths in infants (34%). Most of the poisonings involving amphetamines (81%), cocaine (84%), and alcohol (61.5%) occurred in infants under age 1.

Dr. Smith said that harm-reduction strategies, such as having naloxone on hand and using fentanyl test strips, can reduce the likelihood of death from illicit drugs.
 

Reducing stigma can save lives

“Referring parents to services for individuals who use drugs is key,” Dr. Smith said. “Treating this as a public health problem without stigmatizing the behavior is something that pediatricians and other health care professionals must remember.” As a resource for other pediatricians, Dr. Gaw noted that CHOP’s poison control center medical director Kevin Osterhoudt, MD produced a 25-minute podcast that covers common causes of poisonings, use of naloxone in children, and prevention tips.

“Naloxone is an effective antidote to opioid poisonings,” Dr. Gaw said. “We often think of using it in adults, but this is also a lifesaving medication for children poisoned by opioids. Educating people on recognizing the signs and symptoms of opioid poisoning and helping them feel empowered to use naloxone is something the public health world is working on.”

Dr. Gaw and Dr. Smith had no relevant disclosures. No external funding was noted for the study.

ANAHEIM, CALIF. – Opioids are the most common cause of fatal poisonings in young children, and their contribution to children’s deaths has been increasing, according to research presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference.

The study found that the proportion of deaths in U.S. children linked to opioids has doubled since the mid-2000s, tracking the course of the epidemic in adults in this country.

“What is striking about our study is how the opioid epidemic has not spared our nation’s infants or young children,” Christopher Gaw, MD, MA, a pediatric emergency medicine fellow physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said in an interview. “There is important work being done to reduce unnecessary opioid prescribing, drug diversion, and treatment of substance use disorders. These efforts – though not directly related to children – also help protect them, since they can reduce the chance of exposure to opioids in the home.”

Dr. Gaw and his colleagues analyzed data in Child Death Reviews from 40 states that participate in the National Fatality Review Case Reporting System, focusing on children aged 5 years and younger who died from a poisoning between 2005 and 2018. During that time, 731 child poisoning deaths were reported to the system – of which nearly half (47%) involved opioids as the poisoning agent – up from 24% in 2005. More than 4 in 10 deaths (42%) involved children under age 1.

Most of the deaths (61%) occurred in the child’s home, and in even more cases (71%) the child was being supervised when the poisoning occurred, most often by a parent (58.5%). The others supervising children were usually a grandparent (11%) or another relative (5.5%). The child was in view of the supervising individual in 28.5% of the deaths. A child protective services case was opened in 13% of the cases.

“Supervising a child is hard. Kids are constantly exploring and moving,” Dr. Gaw said. “A child may find a dropped medication on the floor that a caregiver doesn’t see, or a child may get into a bag or a purse when a caregiver is looking the other way. Poisonings can happen in a split second.”

Expecting caregivers to be able to watch kids every moment and always be within arm’s reach to prevent an accident is unrealistic, Dr. Gaw said, so families should focus on preparedness.

“Young children can’t tell the difference between a deadly substance versus a substance that is harmless or would only cause some harm. The best way to protect children is to prevent the poisoning from happening in the first place,” Dr. Gaw said. ”

It is recommended that caregivers keep the Poison Control Center’s national 24/7 hotline in their phones: (800) 222-1222.

Two-thirds of the cases Dr. Gaw examined did not involve a call to a poison control center, but most did involve a call to 911.

“My guess is that caregivers likely called 911 instead of poison control because the child was likely critically ill or deceased when found,” Dr. Gaw said, noting that his group did not have access to descriptive information about 911 calls. “If a child is critically ill and a caregiver called poison control first, they would be referred to 911.”

If a child looks healthy but has just swallowed something dangerous or deadly, Dr. Gaw said poison control can guide the family to getting prompt medical attention that could be lifesaving.

“We don’t expect the public to know what substances are harmless, harmful, or deadly,” he said. “People should always call poison control if there is any concern, even if the child looks well.”

Some poison control centers are working to increase the ways people can reach them, including through texting, apps, or online chat, he added.

Gary A. Smith, MD, DrPH, president of the nonprofit Child Injury Prevention Alliance in Columbus, Ohio, and director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, said the high level of supervision in these cases was not surprising.

”We have shown that most children are being directly supervised at the moment of injury for baby walker–related injuries, firework-related injuries, and other types of injuries that we have studied,” Dr. Smith said in an interview. “Injuries happen quickly and generally do not give a parent or caregiver time to react.”

“This dispels the myth that parental supervision is the key to injury prevention,” Dr. Smith said. “Although supervision helps, it is not adequate. These injuries occur to children of good and caring parents. The message for pediatricians is that we must create safe environments for children and design hazards out of existence to effectively prevent poisoning and other injuries.”

That preventive approach has been used for infectious disease and other public health problems, he added.

“Prescription opioids must be kept in their original containers with children-resistant closures and be stored up, away, and out of sight of children, preferably in a locked location,” Dr. Smith said. “If adults use illicit opioids or any other illicit substances – which are commonly laced with fentanyl – they should not use or store them in the home where children can access them.”

Over-the-counter pain, cold, and allergy medications were the second most common cause of death, occurring in 15% of cases.

“There has been a lot of work over the years among health care providers to counsel families on the proper dosing and use of medications such as Tylenol, Motrin, and Benadryl,” Dr. Gaw said. “There has also been a push to educate families that using antihistamines, such as Benadryl, to sedate their children can be dangerous and, depending on the dose, potentially deadly.”

Another 14% of cases were an unspecified illicit drug, and 10% were an unspecified over-the-counter or prescription medication. Carbon monoxide poisoning made up 6% of cases, and the remaining substances included amphetamines, antidepressants, cocaine, and alcohol.

Over half the deaths in 1-year-olds (61%) and children aged 2-5 (54%) were due to opioid poisoning, as were a third of deaths in infants (34%). Most of the poisonings involving amphetamines (81%), cocaine (84%), and alcohol (61.5%) occurred in infants under age 1.

Dr. Smith said that harm-reduction strategies, such as having naloxone on hand and using fentanyl test strips, can reduce the likelihood of death from illicit drugs.
 

Reducing stigma can save lives

“Referring parents to services for individuals who use drugs is key,” Dr. Smith said. “Treating this as a public health problem without stigmatizing the behavior is something that pediatricians and other health care professionals must remember.” As a resource for other pediatricians, Dr. Gaw noted that CHOP’s poison control center medical director Kevin Osterhoudt, MD produced a 25-minute podcast that covers common causes of poisonings, use of naloxone in children, and prevention tips.

“Naloxone is an effective antidote to opioid poisonings,” Dr. Gaw said. “We often think of using it in adults, but this is also a lifesaving medication for children poisoned by opioids. Educating people on recognizing the signs and symptoms of opioid poisoning and helping them feel empowered to use naloxone is something the public health world is working on.”

Dr. Gaw and Dr. Smith had no relevant disclosures. No external funding was noted for the study.

More than 80% of U.S. maternal deaths across a 2-year period were due to preventable causes, according to a new CDC report.

Black mothers made up about a third of deaths, and more than 90% of deaths among Indigenous mothers were preventable.

“It’s significant. It’s staggering. It’s heartbreaking,” Allison Bryant, MD, a high-risk pregnancy specialist and senior medical director for health equity at Massachusetts General Hospital, told USA Today.

“It just means that we have so much work to do,” she said.

In the report, CDC researchers looked at pregnancy-related deaths between 2017 to 2019 based on numbers from maternal mortality review committees, which are multidisciplinary groups in 36 states that investigate the circumstances around maternal deaths.

Of the 1,018 deaths during the 2-year period, 839 occurred up to a year after delivery. About 22% of deaths happened during pregnancy, and 25% happened on the day of delivery or within a week after delivery. But 53% occurred more than 7 days after delivery.

Mental health conditions, such as overdoses and deaths by suicide, were the top underlying cause, followed by hemorrhage, or extreme bleeding. About a quarter of deaths were due to mental health conditions, followed by 14% due to hemorrhage and 13% due to heart problems. The rest were related to infection, embolism, cardiomyopathy, and high blood pressure-related disorders.

The analysis included a section on maternal deaths for American Indian and Alaska Native mothers, who are more than twice as likely as White mothers to die but are often undercounted in health data due to misclassification. More than 90% of their deaths were preventable between 2017 to 2019, with most due to mental health conditions and hemorrhage.

“It’s incredibly distressful,” Brian Thompson, MD, of the Oneida Nation and assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Upstate Medical University, New York, told USA Today.

Dr. Thompson is working with the National Indian Health Board to create the first national tribal review committee for maternal deaths.

“It really needs to be looked at and examined why that is the case if essentially all of them are preventable,” he said.

Black mothers were also three times as likely as White mothers to die and more likely to die from heart problems. Hispanic mothers, who made up 14% of deaths, were more likely to die from mental health conditions.

Some of the deaths, such as hemorrhage, should be highly preventable. Existing toolkits for clinicians provide evidence-based guidelines to prevent and treat excessive bleeding.

“No pregnant person should be passing away from a hemorrhage,” Andrea Jackson, MD, division chief of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco, told USA Today.

“We have the tools in the United States, and we know how to deal with it,” she said. “That was really disheartening to see.”

What’s more, the new CDC report highlights the need for more mental health resources during pregnancy and the postpartum period – up to a year or more after delivery – including improvements in access to care, diagnosis, and treatment.

“These are things that need to happen systemically,” LeThenia Baker, MD, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Wellstar Health, Georgia, told USA Today.

“It can’t just be a few practices here or there who are adopting best practices,” she said. “It has to be a systemic change.”

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

More than 80% of U.S. maternal deaths across a 2-year period were due to preventable causes, according to a new CDC report.

Black mothers made up about a third of deaths, and more than 90% of deaths among Indigenous mothers were preventable.

“It’s significant. It’s staggering. It’s heartbreaking,” Allison Bryant, MD, a high-risk pregnancy specialist and senior medical director for health equity at Massachusetts General Hospital, told USA Today.

“It just means that we have so much work to do,” she said.

In the report, CDC researchers looked at pregnancy-related deaths between 2017 to 2019 based on numbers from maternal mortality review committees, which are multidisciplinary groups in 36 states that investigate the circumstances around maternal deaths.

Of the 1,018 deaths during the 2-year period, 839 occurred up to a year after delivery. About 22% of deaths happened during pregnancy, and 25% happened on the day of delivery or within a week after delivery. But 53% occurred more than 7 days after delivery.

Mental health conditions, such as overdoses and deaths by suicide, were the top underlying cause, followed by hemorrhage, or extreme bleeding. About a quarter of deaths were due to mental health conditions, followed by 14% due to hemorrhage and 13% due to heart problems. The rest were related to infection, embolism, cardiomyopathy, and high blood pressure-related disorders.

The analysis included a section on maternal deaths for American Indian and Alaska Native mothers, who are more than twice as likely as White mothers to die but are often undercounted in health data due to misclassification. More than 90% of their deaths were preventable between 2017 to 2019, with most due to mental health conditions and hemorrhage.

“It’s incredibly distressful,” Brian Thompson, MD, of the Oneida Nation and assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Upstate Medical University, New York, told USA Today.

Dr. Thompson is working with the National Indian Health Board to create the first national tribal review committee for maternal deaths.

“It really needs to be looked at and examined why that is the case if essentially all of them are preventable,” he said.

Black mothers were also three times as likely as White mothers to die and more likely to die from heart problems. Hispanic mothers, who made up 14% of deaths, were more likely to die from mental health conditions.

Some of the deaths, such as hemorrhage, should be highly preventable. Existing toolkits for clinicians provide evidence-based guidelines to prevent and treat excessive bleeding.

“No pregnant person should be passing away from a hemorrhage,” Andrea Jackson, MD, division chief of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco, told USA Today.

“We have the tools in the United States, and we know how to deal with it,” she said. “That was really disheartening to see.”

What’s more, the new CDC report highlights the need for more mental health resources during pregnancy and the postpartum period – up to a year or more after delivery – including improvements in access to care, diagnosis, and treatment.

“These are things that need to happen systemically,” LeThenia Baker, MD, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Wellstar Health, Georgia, told USA Today.

“It can’t just be a few practices here or there who are adopting best practices,” she said. “It has to be a systemic change.”

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

More than 80% of U.S. maternal deaths across a 2-year period were due to preventable causes, according to a new CDC report.

Black mothers made up about a third of deaths, and more than 90% of deaths among Indigenous mothers were preventable.

“It’s significant. It’s staggering. It’s heartbreaking,” Allison Bryant, MD, a high-risk pregnancy specialist and senior medical director for health equity at Massachusetts General Hospital, told USA Today.

“It just means that we have so much work to do,” she said.

In the report, CDC researchers looked at pregnancy-related deaths between 2017 to 2019 based on numbers from maternal mortality review committees, which are multidisciplinary groups in 36 states that investigate the circumstances around maternal deaths.

Of the 1,018 deaths during the 2-year period, 839 occurred up to a year after delivery. About 22% of deaths happened during pregnancy, and 25% happened on the day of delivery or within a week after delivery. But 53% occurred more than 7 days after delivery.

Mental health conditions, such as overdoses and deaths by suicide, were the top underlying cause, followed by hemorrhage, or extreme bleeding. About a quarter of deaths were due to mental health conditions, followed by 14% due to hemorrhage and 13% due to heart problems. The rest were related to infection, embolism, cardiomyopathy, and high blood pressure-related disorders.

The analysis included a section on maternal deaths for American Indian and Alaska Native mothers, who are more than twice as likely as White mothers to die but are often undercounted in health data due to misclassification. More than 90% of their deaths were preventable between 2017 to 2019, with most due to mental health conditions and hemorrhage.

“It’s incredibly distressful,” Brian Thompson, MD, of the Oneida Nation and assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Upstate Medical University, New York, told USA Today.

Dr. Thompson is working with the National Indian Health Board to create the first national tribal review committee for maternal deaths.

“It really needs to be looked at and examined why that is the case if essentially all of them are preventable,” he said.

Black mothers were also three times as likely as White mothers to die and more likely to die from heart problems. Hispanic mothers, who made up 14% of deaths, were more likely to die from mental health conditions.

Some of the deaths, such as hemorrhage, should be highly preventable. Existing toolkits for clinicians provide evidence-based guidelines to prevent and treat excessive bleeding.

“No pregnant person should be passing away from a hemorrhage,” Andrea Jackson, MD, division chief of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco, told USA Today.

“We have the tools in the United States, and we know how to deal with it,” she said. “That was really disheartening to see.”

What’s more, the new CDC report highlights the need for more mental health resources during pregnancy and the postpartum period – up to a year or more after delivery – including improvements in access to care, diagnosis, and treatment.

“These are things that need to happen systemically,” LeThenia Baker, MD, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Wellstar Health, Georgia, told USA Today.

“It can’t just be a few practices here or there who are adopting best practices,” she said. “It has to be a systemic change.”

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

After more than a week of record-breaking temperatures across much of the country, public health experts are cautioning that children are more susceptible to heat illness than adults are – even more so when they’re on the athletic field, living without air conditioning, or waiting in a parked car.

Cases of heat-related illness are rising with average air temperatures, and experts say almost half of those getting sick are children. The reason is twofold: Children’s bodies have more trouble regulating temperature than do those of adults, and they rely on adults to help protect them from overheating.

Parents, coaches, and other caretakers, who can experience the same heat very differently from the way children do, may struggle to identify a dangerous situation or catch the early symptoms of heat-related illness in children.

“Children are not little adults,” said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, a pediatric hospitalist at Boston Children’s Hospital. 

Jan Null, a meteorologist in California, recalled being surprised at the effect of heat in a car. It was 86 degrees on a July afternoon more than 2 decades ago when an infant in San Jose was forgotten in a parked car and died of heatstroke.

Mr. Null said a reporter asked him after the death, “How hot could it have gotten in that car?”

Mr. Null’s research with two emergency doctors at Stanford University eventually produced a startling answer. Within an hour, the temperature in that car could have exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Their work revealed that a quick errand can be dangerous for a child left behind in the car – even for less than 15 minutes, even with the windows cracked, and even on a mild day.

As record heat becomes more frequent, posing serious risks even to healthy adults, the number of cases of heat-related illnesses has gone up, including among children. Those most at risk are young children in parked vehicles and adolescents returning to school and participating in sports during the hottest days of the year.

More than 9,000 high school athletes are treated for heat-related illnesses every year.

Heat-related illnesses occur when exposure to high temperatures and humidity, which can be intensified by physical exertion, overwhelms the body’s ability to cool itself. Cases range from mild, like benign heat rashes in infants, to more serious, when the body’s core temperature increases. That can lead to life-threatening instances of heatstroke, diagnosed once the body temperature rises above 104 degrees, potentially causing organ failure.

Prevention is key. Experts emphasize that drinking plenty of water, avoiding the outdoors during the hot midday and afternoon hours, and taking it slow when adjusting to exercise are the most effective ways to avoid getting sick.

Children’s bodies take longer to increase sweat production and otherwise acclimatize in a warm environment than adults’ do, research shows. Young children are more susceptible to dehydration because a larger percentage of their body weight is water.

Infants and younger children have more trouble regulating their body temperature, in part because they often don’t recognize when they should drink more water or remove clothing to cool down. A 1995 study showed that young children who spent 30 minutes in a 95-degree room saw their core temperatures rise significantly higher and faster than their mothers’ – even though they sweat more than adults do relative to their size.

Pediatricians advise caretakers to monitor how much water children consume and encourage them to drink before they ask for it. Thirst indicates the body is already dehydrated.

They should dress children in light-colored, lightweight clothes; limit outdoor time during the hottest hours; and look for ways to cool down, such as by visiting an air-conditioned place like a library, taking a cool bath, or going for a swim.

To address the risks to student athletes, the National Athletic Trainers’ Association recommends that high school athletes acclimatize by gradually building their activity over the course of 2 weeks when returning to their sport for a new season – including by slowly stepping up the amount of any protective equipment they wear.

“You’re gradually increasing that intensity over a week to 2 weeks so your body can get used to the heat,” said Kathy Dieringer, president of NATA.
 

Warning signs and solutions

Experts note a flushed face, fatigue, muscle cramps, headache, dizziness, vomiting, and a lot of sweating are among the symptoms of heat exhaustion, which can develop into heatstroke if untreated. A doctor should be notified if symptoms worsen, such as if the child seems disoriented or cannot drink.

Taking immediate steps to cool a child experiencing heat exhaustion or heatstroke is critical. The child should be taken to a shaded or cool area; be given cool fluids with salt, like sports drinks; and have any sweaty or heavy garments removed.

For adolescents, being submerged in an ice bath is the most effective way to cool the body, while younger children can be wrapped in cold, wet towels or misted with lukewarm water and placed in front of a fan.

Although children’s deaths in parked cars have been well documented, the tragic incidents continue to occur. According to federal statistics, 23 children died of vehicular heatstroke in 2021. Mr. Null, who collects his own data, said 13 children have died so far this year.

Caretakers should never leave children alone in a parked car, Mr. Null said. Take steps to prevent young children from entering the car themselves and becoming trapped, including locking the car while it’s parked at home.

More than half of cases of vehicular pediatric heatstroke occur because a caretaker accidentally left a child behind, he said. While in-car technology reminding adults to check their back seats has become more common, only a fraction of vehicles have it, requiring parents to come up with their own methods, like leaving a stuffed animal in the front seat.

The good news, Mr. Null said, is that simple behavioral changes can protect youngsters. “This is preventable in 100% of the cases,” he said.
 

A lopsided risk

People living in low-income areas fare worse when temperatures climb. Access to air conditioning, which includes the ability to afford the electricity bill, is a serious health concern.

A study of heat in urban areas released last year showed that low-income neighborhoods and communities of color experience much higher temperatures than those of wealthier, White residents. In more impoverished areas during the summer, temperatures can be as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer.

The study’s authors said their findings in the United States reflect that “the legacy of redlining looms large,” referring to a federal housing policy that refused to insure mortgages in or near predominantly Black neighborhoods.

“These areas have less tree canopy, more streets, and higher building densities, meaning that in addition to their other racist outcomes, redlining policies directly codified into law existing disparity in urban land use and reinforced urban design choices that magnify urban heating into the present,” they concluded.

Dr. Bernstein, who leads Harvard’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, coauthored a commentary in JAMA arguing that advancing health equity is critical to action on climate change.

The center works with front-line health clinics to help their predominantly low-income patients respond to the health impacts of climate change. Federally backed clinics alone provide care to about 30 million Americans, including many children, he said.

Dr. Bernstein also recently led a nationwide study that found that from May through September, days with higher temperatures are associated with more visits to children’s hospital emergency rooms. Many visits were more directly linked to heat, although the study also pointed to how high temperatures can exacerbate existing health conditions such as neurological disorders.

“Children are more vulnerable to climate change through how these climate shocks reshape the world in which they grow up,” Dr. Bernstein said.

Helping people better understand the health risks of extreme heat and how to protect themselves and their families are among the public health system’s major challenges, experts said.

The National Weather Service’s heat alert system is mainly based on the heat index, a measure of how hot it feels when relative humidity is factored in with air temperature.

But the alerts are not related to effects on health, said Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. By the time temperatures rise to the level that a weather alert is issued, many vulnerable people – like children, pregnant women, and the elderly – may already be experiencing heat exhaustion or heatstroke.

The center developed a new heat alert system, which is being tested in Seville, Spain, historically one of the hottest cities in Europe.

The system marries metrics such as air temperature and humidity with public health data to categorize heat waves and, when they are serious enough, give them names – making it easier for people to understand heat as an environmental threat that requires prevention measures.

The categories are determined through a metric known as excess deaths, which compares how many people died on a day with the forecast temperature versus an average day. That may help health officials understand how severe a heat wave is expected to be and make informed recommendations to the public based on risk factors such as age or medical history.

The health-based alert system would also allow officials to target caretakers of children and seniors through school systems, preschools, and senior centers, Ms. Baughman McLeod said.

Giving people better ways to conceptualize heat is critical, she said.

“It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t rip the roof off of your house,” Ms. Baughman McLeod said. “It’s silent and invisible.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

After more than a week of record-breaking temperatures across much of the country, public health experts are cautioning that children are more susceptible to heat illness than adults are – even more so when they’re on the athletic field, living without air conditioning, or waiting in a parked car.

Cases of heat-related illness are rising with average air temperatures, and experts say almost half of those getting sick are children. The reason is twofold: Children’s bodies have more trouble regulating temperature than do those of adults, and they rely on adults to help protect them from overheating.

Parents, coaches, and other caretakers, who can experience the same heat very differently from the way children do, may struggle to identify a dangerous situation or catch the early symptoms of heat-related illness in children.

“Children are not little adults,” said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, a pediatric hospitalist at Boston Children’s Hospital. 

Jan Null, a meteorologist in California, recalled being surprised at the effect of heat in a car. It was 86 degrees on a July afternoon more than 2 decades ago when an infant in San Jose was forgotten in a parked car and died of heatstroke.

Mr. Null said a reporter asked him after the death, “How hot could it have gotten in that car?”

Mr. Null’s research with two emergency doctors at Stanford University eventually produced a startling answer. Within an hour, the temperature in that car could have exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Their work revealed that a quick errand can be dangerous for a child left behind in the car – even for less than 15 minutes, even with the windows cracked, and even on a mild day.

As record heat becomes more frequent, posing serious risks even to healthy adults, the number of cases of heat-related illnesses has gone up, including among children. Those most at risk are young children in parked vehicles and adolescents returning to school and participating in sports during the hottest days of the year.

More than 9,000 high school athletes are treated for heat-related illnesses every year.

Heat-related illnesses occur when exposure to high temperatures and humidity, which can be intensified by physical exertion, overwhelms the body’s ability to cool itself. Cases range from mild, like benign heat rashes in infants, to more serious, when the body’s core temperature increases. That can lead to life-threatening instances of heatstroke, diagnosed once the body temperature rises above 104 degrees, potentially causing organ failure.

Prevention is key. Experts emphasize that drinking plenty of water, avoiding the outdoors during the hot midday and afternoon hours, and taking it slow when adjusting to exercise are the most effective ways to avoid getting sick.

Children’s bodies take longer to increase sweat production and otherwise acclimatize in a warm environment than adults’ do, research shows. Young children are more susceptible to dehydration because a larger percentage of their body weight is water.

Infants and younger children have more trouble regulating their body temperature, in part because they often don’t recognize when they should drink more water or remove clothing to cool down. A 1995 study showed that young children who spent 30 minutes in a 95-degree room saw their core temperatures rise significantly higher and faster than their mothers’ – even though they sweat more than adults do relative to their size.

Pediatricians advise caretakers to monitor how much water children consume and encourage them to drink before they ask for it. Thirst indicates the body is already dehydrated.

They should dress children in light-colored, lightweight clothes; limit outdoor time during the hottest hours; and look for ways to cool down, such as by visiting an air-conditioned place like a library, taking a cool bath, or going for a swim.

To address the risks to student athletes, the National Athletic Trainers’ Association recommends that high school athletes acclimatize by gradually building their activity over the course of 2 weeks when returning to their sport for a new season – including by slowly stepping up the amount of any protective equipment they wear.

“You’re gradually increasing that intensity over a week to 2 weeks so your body can get used to the heat,” said Kathy Dieringer, president of NATA.
 

Warning signs and solutions

Experts note a flushed face, fatigue, muscle cramps, headache, dizziness, vomiting, and a lot of sweating are among the symptoms of heat exhaustion, which can develop into heatstroke if untreated. A doctor should be notified if symptoms worsen, such as if the child seems disoriented or cannot drink.

Taking immediate steps to cool a child experiencing heat exhaustion or heatstroke is critical. The child should be taken to a shaded or cool area; be given cool fluids with salt, like sports drinks; and have any sweaty or heavy garments removed.

For adolescents, being submerged in an ice bath is the most effective way to cool the body, while younger children can be wrapped in cold, wet towels or misted with lukewarm water and placed in front of a fan.

Although children’s deaths in parked cars have been well documented, the tragic incidents continue to occur. According to federal statistics, 23 children died of vehicular heatstroke in 2021. Mr. Null, who collects his own data, said 13 children have died so far this year.

Caretakers should never leave children alone in a parked car, Mr. Null said. Take steps to prevent young children from entering the car themselves and becoming trapped, including locking the car while it’s parked at home.

More than half of cases of vehicular pediatric heatstroke occur because a caretaker accidentally left a child behind, he said. While in-car technology reminding adults to check their back seats has become more common, only a fraction of vehicles have it, requiring parents to come up with their own methods, like leaving a stuffed animal in the front seat.

The good news, Mr. Null said, is that simple behavioral changes can protect youngsters. “This is preventable in 100% of the cases,” he said.
 

A lopsided risk

People living in low-income areas fare worse when temperatures climb. Access to air conditioning, which includes the ability to afford the electricity bill, is a serious health concern.

A study of heat in urban areas released last year showed that low-income neighborhoods and communities of color experience much higher temperatures than those of wealthier, White residents. In more impoverished areas during the summer, temperatures can be as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer.

The study’s authors said their findings in the United States reflect that “the legacy of redlining looms large,” referring to a federal housing policy that refused to insure mortgages in or near predominantly Black neighborhoods.

“These areas have less tree canopy, more streets, and higher building densities, meaning that in addition to their other racist outcomes, redlining policies directly codified into law existing disparity in urban land use and reinforced urban design choices that magnify urban heating into the present,” they concluded.

Dr. Bernstein, who leads Harvard’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, coauthored a commentary in JAMA arguing that advancing health equity is critical to action on climate change.

The center works with front-line health clinics to help their predominantly low-income patients respond to the health impacts of climate change. Federally backed clinics alone provide care to about 30 million Americans, including many children, he said.

Dr. Bernstein also recently led a nationwide study that found that from May through September, days with higher temperatures are associated with more visits to children’s hospital emergency rooms. Many visits were more directly linked to heat, although the study also pointed to how high temperatures can exacerbate existing health conditions such as neurological disorders.

“Children are more vulnerable to climate change through how these climate shocks reshape the world in which they grow up,” Dr. Bernstein said.

Helping people better understand the health risks of extreme heat and how to protect themselves and their families are among the public health system’s major challenges, experts said.

The National Weather Service’s heat alert system is mainly based on the heat index, a measure of how hot it feels when relative humidity is factored in with air temperature.

But the alerts are not related to effects on health, said Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. By the time temperatures rise to the level that a weather alert is issued, many vulnerable people – like children, pregnant women, and the elderly – may already be experiencing heat exhaustion or heatstroke.

The center developed a new heat alert system, which is being tested in Seville, Spain, historically one of the hottest cities in Europe.

The system marries metrics such as air temperature and humidity with public health data to categorize heat waves and, when they are serious enough, give them names – making it easier for people to understand heat as an environmental threat that requires prevention measures.

The categories are determined through a metric known as excess deaths, which compares how many people died on a day with the forecast temperature versus an average day. That may help health officials understand how severe a heat wave is expected to be and make informed recommendations to the public based on risk factors such as age or medical history.

The health-based alert system would also allow officials to target caretakers of children and seniors through school systems, preschools, and senior centers, Ms. Baughman McLeod said.

Giving people better ways to conceptualize heat is critical, she said.

“It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t rip the roof off of your house,” Ms. Baughman McLeod said. “It’s silent and invisible.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

After more than a week of record-breaking temperatures across much of the country, public health experts are cautioning that children are more susceptible to heat illness than adults are – even more so when they’re on the athletic field, living without air conditioning, or waiting in a parked car.

Cases of heat-related illness are rising with average air temperatures, and experts say almost half of those getting sick are children. The reason is twofold: Children’s bodies have more trouble regulating temperature than do those of adults, and they rely on adults to help protect them from overheating.

Parents, coaches, and other caretakers, who can experience the same heat very differently from the way children do, may struggle to identify a dangerous situation or catch the early symptoms of heat-related illness in children.

“Children are not little adults,” said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, a pediatric hospitalist at Boston Children’s Hospital. 

Jan Null, a meteorologist in California, recalled being surprised at the effect of heat in a car. It was 86 degrees on a July afternoon more than 2 decades ago when an infant in San Jose was forgotten in a parked car and died of heatstroke.

Mr. Null said a reporter asked him after the death, “How hot could it have gotten in that car?”

Mr. Null’s research with two emergency doctors at Stanford University eventually produced a startling answer. Within an hour, the temperature in that car could have exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Their work revealed that a quick errand can be dangerous for a child left behind in the car – even for less than 15 minutes, even with the windows cracked, and even on a mild day.

As record heat becomes more frequent, posing serious risks even to healthy adults, the number of cases of heat-related illnesses has gone up, including among children. Those most at risk are young children in parked vehicles and adolescents returning to school and participating in sports during the hottest days of the year.

More than 9,000 high school athletes are treated for heat-related illnesses every year.

Heat-related illnesses occur when exposure to high temperatures and humidity, which can be intensified by physical exertion, overwhelms the body’s ability to cool itself. Cases range from mild, like benign heat rashes in infants, to more serious, when the body’s core temperature increases. That can lead to life-threatening instances of heatstroke, diagnosed once the body temperature rises above 104 degrees, potentially causing organ failure.

Prevention is key. Experts emphasize that drinking plenty of water, avoiding the outdoors during the hot midday and afternoon hours, and taking it slow when adjusting to exercise are the most effective ways to avoid getting sick.

Children’s bodies take longer to increase sweat production and otherwise acclimatize in a warm environment than adults’ do, research shows. Young children are more susceptible to dehydration because a larger percentage of their body weight is water.

Infants and younger children have more trouble regulating their body temperature, in part because they often don’t recognize when they should drink more water or remove clothing to cool down. A 1995 study showed that young children who spent 30 minutes in a 95-degree room saw their core temperatures rise significantly higher and faster than their mothers’ – even though they sweat more than adults do relative to their size.

Pediatricians advise caretakers to monitor how much water children consume and encourage them to drink before they ask for it. Thirst indicates the body is already dehydrated.

They should dress children in light-colored, lightweight clothes; limit outdoor time during the hottest hours; and look for ways to cool down, such as by visiting an air-conditioned place like a library, taking a cool bath, or going for a swim.

To address the risks to student athletes, the National Athletic Trainers’ Association recommends that high school athletes acclimatize by gradually building their activity over the course of 2 weeks when returning to their sport for a new season – including by slowly stepping up the amount of any protective equipment they wear.

“You’re gradually increasing that intensity over a week to 2 weeks so your body can get used to the heat,” said Kathy Dieringer, president of NATA.
 

Warning signs and solutions

Experts note a flushed face, fatigue, muscle cramps, headache, dizziness, vomiting, and a lot of sweating are among the symptoms of heat exhaustion, which can develop into heatstroke if untreated. A doctor should be notified if symptoms worsen, such as if the child seems disoriented or cannot drink.

Taking immediate steps to cool a child experiencing heat exhaustion or heatstroke is critical. The child should be taken to a shaded or cool area; be given cool fluids with salt, like sports drinks; and have any sweaty or heavy garments removed.

For adolescents, being submerged in an ice bath is the most effective way to cool the body, while younger children can be wrapped in cold, wet towels or misted with lukewarm water and placed in front of a fan.

Although children’s deaths in parked cars have been well documented, the tragic incidents continue to occur. According to federal statistics, 23 children died of vehicular heatstroke in 2021. Mr. Null, who collects his own data, said 13 children have died so far this year.

Caretakers should never leave children alone in a parked car, Mr. Null said. Take steps to prevent young children from entering the car themselves and becoming trapped, including locking the car while it’s parked at home.

More than half of cases of vehicular pediatric heatstroke occur because a caretaker accidentally left a child behind, he said. While in-car technology reminding adults to check their back seats has become more common, only a fraction of vehicles have it, requiring parents to come up with their own methods, like leaving a stuffed animal in the front seat.

The good news, Mr. Null said, is that simple behavioral changes can protect youngsters. “This is preventable in 100% of the cases,” he said.
 

A lopsided risk

People living in low-income areas fare worse when temperatures climb. Access to air conditioning, which includes the ability to afford the electricity bill, is a serious health concern.

A study of heat in urban areas released last year showed that low-income neighborhoods and communities of color experience much higher temperatures than those of wealthier, White residents. In more impoverished areas during the summer, temperatures can be as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer.

The study’s authors said their findings in the United States reflect that “the legacy of redlining looms large,” referring to a federal housing policy that refused to insure mortgages in or near predominantly Black neighborhoods.

“These areas have less tree canopy, more streets, and higher building densities, meaning that in addition to their other racist outcomes, redlining policies directly codified into law existing disparity in urban land use and reinforced urban design choices that magnify urban heating into the present,” they concluded.

Dr. Bernstein, who leads Harvard’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, coauthored a commentary in JAMA arguing that advancing health equity is critical to action on climate change.

The center works with front-line health clinics to help their predominantly low-income patients respond to the health impacts of climate change. Federally backed clinics alone provide care to about 30 million Americans, including many children, he said.

Dr. Bernstein also recently led a nationwide study that found that from May through September, days with higher temperatures are associated with more visits to children’s hospital emergency rooms. Many visits were more directly linked to heat, although the study also pointed to how high temperatures can exacerbate existing health conditions such as neurological disorders.

“Children are more vulnerable to climate change through how these climate shocks reshape the world in which they grow up,” Dr. Bernstein said.

Helping people better understand the health risks of extreme heat and how to protect themselves and their families are among the public health system’s major challenges, experts said.

The National Weather Service’s heat alert system is mainly based on the heat index, a measure of how hot it feels when relative humidity is factored in with air temperature.

But the alerts are not related to effects on health, said Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. By the time temperatures rise to the level that a weather alert is issued, many vulnerable people – like children, pregnant women, and the elderly – may already be experiencing heat exhaustion or heatstroke.

The center developed a new heat alert system, which is being tested in Seville, Spain, historically one of the hottest cities in Europe.

The system marries metrics such as air temperature and humidity with public health data to categorize heat waves and, when they are serious enough, give them names – making it easier for people to understand heat as an environmental threat that requires prevention measures.

The categories are determined through a metric known as excess deaths, which compares how many people died on a day with the forecast temperature versus an average day. That may help health officials understand how severe a heat wave is expected to be and make informed recommendations to the public based on risk factors such as age or medical history.

The health-based alert system would also allow officials to target caretakers of children and seniors through school systems, preschools, and senior centers, Ms. Baughman McLeod said.

Giving people better ways to conceptualize heat is critical, she said.

“It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t rip the roof off of your house,” Ms. Baughman McLeod said. “It’s silent and invisible.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

School shootings from 2020 to 2021 climbed to the highest point in 2 decades, according to a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

There were 93 shootings with casualties at public and private K-12 schools across the United States from 2020 to 2021, as compared with 23 in the 2000-2001 school year. The latest number included 43 incidents with deaths.

The annual report, which examines crime and safety in schools and colleges, also found a rise in cyberbullying and verbal abuse or disrespect of teachers during the past decade.

“While the lasting impact of these crime and safety issues cannot be measured in statistics alone, these data are valuable to the efforts of our policymakers, school officials and community members to identify and implement preventive and responsive measures,” Peggy Carr, PhD, the commissioner for the National Center for Education Statistics, said in a statement.

The report used a broad definition of shootings, which included instances when guns were fired or flashed on school property, as well as when a bullet hit school grounds for any reason and shootings that happened on school property during remote instruction throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than 311,000 children at 331 schools have gone through gun violence since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, according to The Washington Post.

“The increase in shootings in schools is likely a consequence of an overall increase in gun violence and not specific to schools,” Dewey Cornell, PhD, a professor of education at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, told the newspaper.

“However, most schools will never have a shooting, and their main problems will be fighting and bullying,” he said.

Between 2009 and 2020, the rate of nonfatal criminal victimization, including theft and violent crimes, decreased for ages 12-18, the report found. The rate fell from 51 victimizations per 1,000 students to 11. A major portion of the decline happened during the first year of the pandemic.

Lower percentages of public schools reported certain issues from 2019 to 2020 than from 2009 to 2010, the report found. For instance, 15% of schools reported student bullying at least once a week, as compared with 23% a decade ago. Student sexual harassment of other students dropped from 3% to 2%, and student harassment of other students based on sexual orientation or gender identity dropped from 3% to 2%.

At the same time, teachers faced more hardships, the report found. Schools reporting verbal abuse of teachers at least once a week rose to 10% in the 2019-2020 school year, as compared with 5% in the 2009-2010 school year. Schools reporting acts of disrespect for teachers climbed from 9% to 15%.

The percentage of schools that reported cyberbullying at least once a week doubled during the decade, rising from 8% in 2009-2010 to 16% in 2019-2020, the report found. The prominence of social media has likely added to that increase, the Post reported.

What’s more, about 55% of public schools offered mental health assessments in 2019-2020, and 42% offered mental health treatment services, the report found. The low rates could be linked to not having enough funding or access to licensed professionals, the newspaper reported.

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

School shootings from 2020 to 2021 climbed to the highest point in 2 decades, according to a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

There were 93 shootings with casualties at public and private K-12 schools across the United States from 2020 to 2021, as compared with 23 in the 2000-2001 school year. The latest number included 43 incidents with deaths.

The annual report, which examines crime and safety in schools and colleges, also found a rise in cyberbullying and verbal abuse or disrespect of teachers during the past decade.

“While the lasting impact of these crime and safety issues cannot be measured in statistics alone, these data are valuable to the efforts of our policymakers, school officials and community members to identify and implement preventive and responsive measures,” Peggy Carr, PhD, the commissioner for the National Center for Education Statistics, said in a statement.

The report used a broad definition of shootings, which included instances when guns were fired or flashed on school property, as well as when a bullet hit school grounds for any reason and shootings that happened on school property during remote instruction throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than 311,000 children at 331 schools have gone through gun violence since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, according to The Washington Post.

“The increase in shootings in schools is likely a consequence of an overall increase in gun violence and not specific to schools,” Dewey Cornell, PhD, a professor of education at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, told the newspaper.

“However, most schools will never have a shooting, and their main problems will be fighting and bullying,” he said.

Between 2009 and 2020, the rate of nonfatal criminal victimization, including theft and violent crimes, decreased for ages 12-18, the report found. The rate fell from 51 victimizations per 1,000 students to 11. A major portion of the decline happened during the first year of the pandemic.

Lower percentages of public schools reported certain issues from 2019 to 2020 than from 2009 to 2010, the report found. For instance, 15% of schools reported student bullying at least once a week, as compared with 23% a decade ago. Student sexual harassment of other students dropped from 3% to 2%, and student harassment of other students based on sexual orientation or gender identity dropped from 3% to 2%.

At the same time, teachers faced more hardships, the report found. Schools reporting verbal abuse of teachers at least once a week rose to 10% in the 2019-2020 school year, as compared with 5% in the 2009-2010 school year. Schools reporting acts of disrespect for teachers climbed from 9% to 15%.

The percentage of schools that reported cyberbullying at least once a week doubled during the decade, rising from 8% in 2009-2010 to 16% in 2019-2020, the report found. The prominence of social media has likely added to that increase, the Post reported.

What’s more, about 55% of public schools offered mental health assessments in 2019-2020, and 42% offered mental health treatment services, the report found. The low rates could be linked to not having enough funding or access to licensed professionals, the newspaper reported.

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

School shootings from 2020 to 2021 climbed to the highest point in 2 decades, according to a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

There were 93 shootings with casualties at public and private K-12 schools across the United States from 2020 to 2021, as compared with 23 in the 2000-2001 school year. The latest number included 43 incidents with deaths.

The annual report, which examines crime and safety in schools and colleges, also found a rise in cyberbullying and verbal abuse or disrespect of teachers during the past decade.

“While the lasting impact of these crime and safety issues cannot be measured in statistics alone, these data are valuable to the efforts of our policymakers, school officials and community members to identify and implement preventive and responsive measures,” Peggy Carr, PhD, the commissioner for the National Center for Education Statistics, said in a statement.

The report used a broad definition of shootings, which included instances when guns were fired or flashed on school property, as well as when a bullet hit school grounds for any reason and shootings that happened on school property during remote instruction throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than 311,000 children at 331 schools have gone through gun violence since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, according to The Washington Post.

“The increase in shootings in schools is likely a consequence of an overall increase in gun violence and not specific to schools,” Dewey Cornell, PhD, a professor of education at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, told the newspaper.

“However, most schools will never have a shooting, and their main problems will be fighting and bullying,” he said.

Between 2009 and 2020, the rate of nonfatal criminal victimization, including theft and violent crimes, decreased for ages 12-18, the report found. The rate fell from 51 victimizations per 1,000 students to 11. A major portion of the decline happened during the first year of the pandemic.

Lower percentages of public schools reported certain issues from 2019 to 2020 than from 2009 to 2010, the report found. For instance, 15% of schools reported student bullying at least once a week, as compared with 23% a decade ago. Student sexual harassment of other students dropped from 3% to 2%, and student harassment of other students based on sexual orientation or gender identity dropped from 3% to 2%.

At the same time, teachers faced more hardships, the report found. Schools reporting verbal abuse of teachers at least once a week rose to 10% in the 2019-2020 school year, as compared with 5% in the 2009-2010 school year. Schools reporting acts of disrespect for teachers climbed from 9% to 15%.

The percentage of schools that reported cyberbullying at least once a week doubled during the decade, rising from 8% in 2009-2010 to 16% in 2019-2020, the report found. The prominence of social media has likely added to that increase, the Post reported.

What’s more, about 55% of public schools offered mental health assessments in 2019-2020, and 42% offered mental health treatment services, the report found. The low rates could be linked to not having enough funding or access to licensed professionals, the newspaper reported.

A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.

Longstanding anxiety around use of epinephrine autoinjectors has prompted research into alternative delivery routes for this life-saving medication. Several companies presented posters on their needle-free epinephrine products at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (AAAAI) Annual Meeting.

Intranasal formulations are under development at ARS Pharmaceuticals (San Diego) and Bryn Pharma (Raleigh, N.C.). And Aquestive Therapeutics (Warren, N.J.) is working on a sublingual film that delivers epinephrine prodrug when applied under the tongue.

Epinephrine is essential for stopping life-threatening allergic reactions, yet patients often don’t carry their autoinjectors and many hesitate to use them. “It’s needle phobia,” said ARS Pharmaceuticals CEO Richard Lowenthal in an interview with this news organization. “They’re afraid to use it. They don’t like to inject their children, so they hesitate.” 

Both nasal sprays reached maximal plasma concentration in 20-30 minutes. ARS Pharmaceuticals compared its intranasal product (Neffy 1 mg) against manual intramuscular injection (0.3 mg) and two autoinjectors (EpiPen 0.3 mg and Symjepi 0.3 mg) by analyzing data from multiple randomized crossover Phase 1 studies examining pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics in 175 healthy adults. In this integrated analysis, EpiPen was fastest (20 minutes) at reaching maximal concentration (Tmax), followed by Symjepi and Neffy (both 30 minutes) and epinephrine 0.3 mg IM (45 minutes). In a human factors analysis, ARS Pharmaceuticals reported that untrained participants were able to administer the Neffy spray to themselves or another participant safely and effectively during a simulated emergency scenario.

Bryn Pharma compared pharmacokinetics of its nasal spray product (BRYN-NDS1C 6.6 mg) when self-administered or administered by trained professionals and found comparable profiles for each. Tmax values were also similar: 21.63 minutes (trained professional) and 19.82 minutes (self-administered).

Aquestive Therapeutics is developing a postage stamp-sized product (AQST-109) that delivers epinephrine and begins dissolving when placed under the tongue. No water or swallowing is required for administration, and its packaging is thinner and smaller than a credit card, according to CEO Keith Kendall. 

Its analysis showed that the epinephrine reaches maximum plasma concentration in about 15 minutes, with a Tmax range narrower than that of the EpiPen. “The results showed dosing with AQST-109 resulted in PK concentration and Tmax values comparable to published data from autoinjectors,” said John Oppenheimer, MD, of Rutgers University School of Medicine, in a prerecorded poster summary.

Aquestive aims to move forward to the manufacture of registration batches and a pivotal pharmacokinetic study in the second half of 2022. Mr. Lowenthal said ARS Pharmaceuticals is hoping for approval and launch of its nasal spray by summer 2023.

“Having a non-needle delivery device would help many people overcome that fear and hopefully increase use in anaphylaxis,” said David Stukus, MD, an allergist-immunologist and professor of clinical pediatrics at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus, who was not involved with any of the studies on EpiPen alternatives. And “it’s not just food allergy – anaphylaxis can occur from venom stings, medications, or idiopathic causes.”

Mr. Lowenthal is the CEO of ARS Pharmaceuticals. Mr. Kendall is CEO of Aquestive Therapeutics. Dr. Oppenheimer is a consultant for Aquestive, GSK, Amgen, Sanofi, and Aimmune and sits on Aquestive’s advisory board. Dr. Stukus is a consultant for Novartis.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Longstanding anxiety around use of epinephrine autoinjectors has prompted research into alternative delivery routes for this life-saving medication. Several companies presented posters on their needle-free epinephrine products at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (AAAAI) Annual Meeting.

Intranasal formulations are under development at ARS Pharmaceuticals (San Diego) and Bryn Pharma (Raleigh, N.C.). And Aquestive Therapeutics (Warren, N.J.) is working on a sublingual film that delivers epinephrine prodrug when applied under the tongue.

Epinephrine is essential for stopping life-threatening allergic reactions, yet patients often don’t carry their autoinjectors and many hesitate to use them. “It’s needle phobia,” said ARS Pharmaceuticals CEO Richard Lowenthal in an interview with this news organization. “They’re afraid to use it. They don’t like to inject their children, so they hesitate.” 

Both nasal sprays reached maximal plasma concentration in 20-30 minutes. ARS Pharmaceuticals compared its intranasal product (Neffy 1 mg) against manual intramuscular injection (0.3 mg) and two autoinjectors (EpiPen 0.3 mg and Symjepi 0.3 mg) by analyzing data from multiple randomized crossover Phase 1 studies examining pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics in 175 healthy adults. In this integrated analysis, EpiPen was fastest (20 minutes) at reaching maximal concentration (Tmax), followed by Symjepi and Neffy (both 30 minutes) and epinephrine 0.3 mg IM (45 minutes). In a human factors analysis, ARS Pharmaceuticals reported that untrained participants were able to administer the Neffy spray to themselves or another participant safely and effectively during a simulated emergency scenario.

Bryn Pharma compared pharmacokinetics of its nasal spray product (BRYN-NDS1C 6.6 mg) when self-administered or administered by trained professionals and found comparable profiles for each. Tmax values were also similar: 21.63 minutes (trained professional) and 19.82 minutes (self-administered).

Aquestive Therapeutics is developing a postage stamp-sized product (AQST-109) that delivers epinephrine and begins dissolving when placed under the tongue. No water or swallowing is required for administration, and its packaging is thinner and smaller than a credit card, according to CEO Keith Kendall. 

Its analysis showed that the epinephrine reaches maximum plasma concentration in about 15 minutes, with a Tmax range narrower than that of the EpiPen. “The results showed dosing with AQST-109 resulted in PK concentration and Tmax values comparable to published data from autoinjectors,” said John Oppenheimer, MD, of Rutgers University School of Medicine, in a prerecorded poster summary.

Aquestive aims to move forward to the manufacture of registration batches and a pivotal pharmacokinetic study in the second half of 2022. Mr. Lowenthal said ARS Pharmaceuticals is hoping for approval and launch of its nasal spray by summer 2023.

“Having a non-needle delivery device would help many people overcome that fear and hopefully increase use in anaphylaxis,” said David Stukus, MD, an allergist-immunologist and professor of clinical pediatrics at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus, who was not involved with any of the studies on EpiPen alternatives. And “it’s not just food allergy – anaphylaxis can occur from venom stings, medications, or idiopathic causes.”

Mr. Lowenthal is the CEO of ARS Pharmaceuticals. Mr. Kendall is CEO of Aquestive Therapeutics. Dr. Oppenheimer is a consultant for Aquestive, GSK, Amgen, Sanofi, and Aimmune and sits on Aquestive’s advisory board. Dr. Stukus is a consultant for Novartis.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Longstanding anxiety around use of epinephrine autoinjectors has prompted research into alternative delivery routes for this life-saving medication. Several companies presented posters on their needle-free epinephrine products at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (AAAAI) Annual Meeting.

Intranasal formulations are under development at ARS Pharmaceuticals (San Diego) and Bryn Pharma (Raleigh, N.C.). And Aquestive Therapeutics (Warren, N.J.) is working on a sublingual film that delivers epinephrine prodrug when applied under the tongue.

Epinephrine is essential for stopping life-threatening allergic reactions, yet patients often don’t carry their autoinjectors and many hesitate to use them. “It’s needle phobia,” said ARS Pharmaceuticals CEO Richard Lowenthal in an interview with this news organization. “They’re afraid to use it. They don’t like to inject their children, so they hesitate.” 

Both nasal sprays reached maximal plasma concentration in 20-30 minutes. ARS Pharmaceuticals compared its intranasal product (Neffy 1 mg) against manual intramuscular injection (0.3 mg) and two autoinjectors (EpiPen 0.3 mg and Symjepi 0.3 mg) by analyzing data from multiple randomized crossover Phase 1 studies examining pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics in 175 healthy adults. In this integrated analysis, EpiPen was fastest (20 minutes) at reaching maximal concentration (Tmax), followed by Symjepi and Neffy (both 30 minutes) and epinephrine 0.3 mg IM (45 minutes). In a human factors analysis, ARS Pharmaceuticals reported that untrained participants were able to administer the Neffy spray to themselves or another participant safely and effectively during a simulated emergency scenario.

Bryn Pharma compared pharmacokinetics of its nasal spray product (BRYN-NDS1C 6.6 mg) when self-administered or administered by trained professionals and found comparable profiles for each. Tmax values were also similar: 21.63 minutes (trained professional) and 19.82 minutes (self-administered).

Aquestive Therapeutics is developing a postage stamp-sized product (AQST-109) that delivers epinephrine and begins dissolving when placed under the tongue. No water or swallowing is required for administration, and its packaging is thinner and smaller than a credit card, according to CEO Keith Kendall. 

Its analysis showed that the epinephrine reaches maximum plasma concentration in about 15 minutes, with a Tmax range narrower than that of the EpiPen. “The results showed dosing with AQST-109 resulted in PK concentration and Tmax values comparable to published data from autoinjectors,” said John Oppenheimer, MD, of Rutgers University School of Medicine, in a prerecorded poster summary.

Aquestive aims to move forward to the manufacture of registration batches and a pivotal pharmacokinetic study in the second half of 2022. Mr. Lowenthal said ARS Pharmaceuticals is hoping for approval and launch of its nasal spray by summer 2023.

“Having a non-needle delivery device would help many people overcome that fear and hopefully increase use in anaphylaxis,” said David Stukus, MD, an allergist-immunologist and professor of clinical pediatrics at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus, who was not involved with any of the studies on EpiPen alternatives. And “it’s not just food allergy – anaphylaxis can occur from venom stings, medications, or idiopathic causes.”

Mr. Lowenthal is the CEO of ARS Pharmaceuticals. Mr. Kendall is CEO of Aquestive Therapeutics. Dr. Oppenheimer is a consultant for Aquestive, GSK, Amgen, Sanofi, and Aimmune and sits on Aquestive’s advisory board. Dr. Stukus is a consultant for Novartis.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Some details have been changed to protect the patient’s identity.

The first thing I noticed about Mr. Barry as I entered the intensive care unit was his left foot: Half of it was black, shriveled, and gangrenous, jutting out from under the white blanket. The soft rays of the morning sun illuminated his gaunt, unshaven, hollow cheeks. Sedated on propofol, with a green endotracheal tube sticking out of his chapped lips, he looked frail. His nurse, Becky, had just cleaned him after he passed tarry, maroon-colored stool. As she turned him over, I saw that the skin over his tailbone was broken. He had a large decubitus ulcer, the edges of which were now dried and black. The Foley bag, hanging next to his bed, was empty; there had been no urine for several hours now.

No one knew much about Mr. Barry. I don’t mean his current medical status – I mean what he did in life, who he loved, whether he had kids, what he valued. All we knew was that he was 83 years old and lived alone. No prior records in our system. No advanced directives. No information on any family. One of his neighbors called 911 after he was not seen for at least 10 days. Emergency medical services found Mr. Barry in bed, nearly lifeless. In the emergency room, he was noted to be in shock, with a dangerously low blood pressure. He was dry as a bone with markedly elevated sodium levels. His laboratory makers for kidney and liver function were deranged. He was admitted to the medical ICU with a diagnosis of hypovolemic shock and/or septic shock with multiorgan dysfunction. With 48 hours of supportive management with intravenous fluids and antibiotics, he did not improve. Blood cultures were positive for gram-positive cocci. The doses for medications used to maintain the blood pressure increased steadily. He also developed gastrointestinal bleeding.
 

Futile vs. potentially inappropriate

I was called for a cardiology consult because he had transient ST elevation in inferolateral leads on the monitor. Given his clinical scenario, the likelihood of type 1 myocardial infarction from plaque rupture was low; the ST elevations were probably related to vasospasm from increasing pressor requirement. Diagnostic cardiac catheterization showed clean coronary arteries. Continuous renal replacement therapy was soon started. Given Mr Barry’s multiorgan dysfunction and extremely poor prognosis, I recommended making all efforts to find his family or surrogate decision-maker to discuss goals of care or having a two-physician sign-off to place a DNR order.

Despite all efforts, we could not trace the family. We physicians vary individually on how we define value as related to life. We also vary on the degree of uncertainty about prognostication that we are comfortable with. This is one of the reasons the term “futility” is controversial and there is a push to use “potentially inappropriate” instead. The primary team had a different threshold for placing a DNR order and did not do it. That night, after I left the hospital, Mr Barry had a PEA (pulseless electrical activity) arrest and was resuscitated after 10 minutes of CPR. The next day, I noticed his bruised chest. He was on multiple medications to support his blood pressure.
 

My patient and a Hemingway protagonist

Whether by coincidence or irony, I started reading Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” the same day that I met Mr. Barry. He reminded me of the story’s protagonist, Harry, lying on the cot with a gangrenous leg, waiting to die. Harry could sense death approaching. He reminisced about his past. All he wanted was to drink his “whiskey-soda.” “Darling, don’t drink that. We have to do everything we can,” his wife said. “You do it. I am tired,” Harry said, and continued to drink his whiskey-soda.

Mr. Barry looked tired. Tired of life? I can’t say with certainty. However, if I had to guess, the medical team’s heroics meant nothing to him. Unfortunately, he was not awake like Harry and could not do what he wished. I wondered what snippets of his life flashed before him as he lay on his bed at home for days. Did he want to have a whiskey-soda before dying? But we are not letting him die. Not easily anyway. We have to do everything we can: medications, coronary angiogram, dialysis, multiple rounds of CPR. Why?

In this country, we need permission to forgo CPR. If there are no advanced directives or next of kin available to discuss end-of-life care, performing CPR is the default status for all hospitalized patients, irrespective of the underlying severity of the illness. A unilateral DNR order written by a physician in good conscience (in a medically futile situation), but to which the patient has not consented, is generally invalid in most U.S. states. If health directives are not available, CPR will be administered on the presumption that the patient would want us to “do everything we can.” The medicolegal consequences and fear of not administering CPR is more profound than being found wrong and defying a patient’s wishes against CPR.

In patients with outside-hospital cardiac arrest, especially if related to ventricular fibrillation, early bystander CPR improves the survival rate. Hence, it makes sense for first responders and paramedics to administer CPR as the default option, focusing on the technique, rather than thinking about its utility based on the patient’s underlying comorbidities.

In the inpatient setting, however, physicians have enough information to comprehensively evaluate the patient. In a cohort of 5,690 critically ill ICU patients, obtained from a U.S. registry, the rate of survival to discharge after inpatient cardiac arrest is very low at 12.5%. Chronic health conditions, malignancy, end-stage renal disease, multiorgan dysfunction, need for vasopressor support, prior CPR, initial rhythm of asystole, or PEA advanced age were all associated with a less than 10% survival rate after CPR.

Dying is a process. Administering CPR to a dying patient is of little to no value. For Mr. Barry, it resulted in a bruised chest and broken ribs. James R. Jude, MD, one of the pioneers of closed chest compression, or modern-day CPR, wrote in 1965 that “resuscitation of the dying patient with irreparable damage to lungs, heart, kidneys, brain or any other vital system of the body has no medical, ethical, or moral justification. The techniques described in this monograph were designed to resuscitate the victim of acute insult, whether be it from drowning, electrical shock, untoward effect of drugs, anesthetic accident, heart block, acute myocardial infarction, or surgery.”

Yet, doctors continue to provide futile treatments at end of life for a variety of reasons: concerns about medico-legal risks, discomfort or inexperience with death and dying, uncertainty in prognostication, family requests, and organizational barriers such as lack of palliative services that can help lead end-of-life care discussions. Despite knowing that CPR has little benefit in critically ill patients with terminal illness and multiorgan dysfunction, we often ask the patient and their surrogate decision-makers: “If your heart stops, do you want us to restore your heart by pressing on the chest and giving electric shocks?” The very act of asking the question implies that CPR may be beneficial. We often do not go over the risks or offer an opinion on whether CPR should be performed. We take a neutral stance.

Anoxic brain injury, pain from broken ribs, and low likelihood of survival to discharge with acceptable neurologic recovery are rarely discussed in detail. Laypeople may overestimate the chances of survival after CPR and they may not comprehend that it does not reverse the dying process in patients with a terminal illness. When you ask about CPR, most families hear: “Do you want your loved one to live?” and the answer is nearly always “Yes.” We then administer CPR, thinking that we are respecting the patient’s autonomy in the medical decision-making process. However, in end-of-life care, elderly patients or surrogates may not fully understand the complexities involved or the outcomes of CPR. So, are we truly respecting their autonomy?
 

When to offer CPR?

In 2011, Billings and Krakauer, palliative care specialists from Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, suggested that we focus on understanding our patient’s values and goals of care, and then decide whether to offer CPR, rather than taking a neutral stance. With this approach, we continue to respect the patient’s autonomy and also affirm our responsibility in providing care consistent with medical reality. We need to have the humility to accept that death is inevitable. Taking care of the dying to ensure a peaceful and dignified death is as much our moral and ethical responsibility as respecting a patient’s autonomy.

It has been 10 years since a group of physicians from Columbia University Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, MGH, and Boston Children’s Hospital proposed changes to how we determine resuscitation status. Instead of assuming that CPR is always wanted, they suggested three distinct approaches: consider CPR when the benefits versus risks are uncertain, and the patient is not end stage; recommend against CPR when there is a low likelihood of benefit and high likelihood of harm (e.g., patients with anoxic brain injury, advanced incurable cancer, or end-stage multiorgan dysfunction); and do not offer CPR to patients who will die imminently and have no chance of surviving CPR (e.g., patients with multiorgan dysfunction, increasing pressor requirements, and those who are actively dying without a single immediately reversible cause). I agree with their proposal.

Mr. Barry was actively dying. Unfortunately, we had neither his advanced directives nor access to family members or surrogates to discuss values and goals of care. Given the futility of administering CPR again, and based on our humanitarian principles, a moral and ethical responsibility to ensure a peaceful dying process, I and another ICU attending placed the DNR order. He passed away, peacefully, within a few hours.

That evening, as I was sitting on my porch reading the last page of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” my phone pinged. It was an email asking me to complete the final attestation for the death certificate. I imagined that Mr. Barry knew where he was going. He probably had his own special place – something beautiful and majestic, great and tall, dazzlingly white in the hot sun, like the snow-capped mountain of Kilimanjaro that Harry saw at the time of his death.

Dr. Mallidi is a general cardiologist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, UCSF. He disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Some details have been changed to protect the patient’s identity.

The first thing I noticed about Mr. Barry as I entered the intensive care unit was his left foot: Half of it was black, shriveled, and gangrenous, jutting out from under the white blanket. The soft rays of the morning sun illuminated his gaunt, unshaven, hollow cheeks. Sedated on propofol, with a green endotracheal tube sticking out of his chapped lips, he looked frail. His nurse, Becky, had just cleaned him after he passed tarry, maroon-colored stool. As she turned him over, I saw that the skin over his tailbone was broken. He had a large decubitus ulcer, the edges of which were now dried and black. The Foley bag, hanging next to his bed, was empty; there had been no urine for several hours now.

No one knew much about Mr. Barry. I don’t mean his current medical status – I mean what he did in life, who he loved, whether he had kids, what he valued. All we knew was that he was 83 years old and lived alone. No prior records in our system. No advanced directives. No information on any family. One of his neighbors called 911 after he was not seen for at least 10 days. Emergency medical services found Mr. Barry in bed, nearly lifeless. In the emergency room, he was noted to be in shock, with a dangerously low blood pressure. He was dry as a bone with markedly elevated sodium levels. His laboratory makers for kidney and liver function were deranged. He was admitted to the medical ICU with a diagnosis of hypovolemic shock and/or septic shock with multiorgan dysfunction. With 48 hours of supportive management with intravenous fluids and antibiotics, he did not improve. Blood cultures were positive for gram-positive cocci. The doses for medications used to maintain the blood pressure increased steadily. He also developed gastrointestinal bleeding.
 

Futile vs. potentially inappropriate

I was called for a cardiology consult because he had transient ST elevation in inferolateral leads on the monitor. Given his clinical scenario, the likelihood of type 1 myocardial infarction from plaque rupture was low; the ST elevations were probably related to vasospasm from increasing pressor requirement. Diagnostic cardiac catheterization showed clean coronary arteries. Continuous renal replacement therapy was soon started. Given Mr Barry’s multiorgan dysfunction and extremely poor prognosis, I recommended making all efforts to find his family or surrogate decision-maker to discuss goals of care or having a two-physician sign-off to place a DNR order.

Despite all efforts, we could not trace the family. We physicians vary individually on how we define value as related to life. We also vary on the degree of uncertainty about prognostication that we are comfortable with. This is one of the reasons the term “futility” is controversial and there is a push to use “potentially inappropriate” instead. The primary team had a different threshold for placing a DNR order and did not do it. That night, after I left the hospital, Mr Barry had a PEA (pulseless electrical activity) arrest and was resuscitated after 10 minutes of CPR. The next day, I noticed his bruised chest. He was on multiple medications to support his blood pressure.
 

My patient and a Hemingway protagonist

Whether by coincidence or irony, I started reading Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” the same day that I met Mr. Barry. He reminded me of the story’s protagonist, Harry, lying on the cot with a gangrenous leg, waiting to die. Harry could sense death approaching. He reminisced about his past. All he wanted was to drink his “whiskey-soda.” “Darling, don’t drink that. We have to do everything we can,” his wife said. “You do it. I am tired,” Harry said, and continued to drink his whiskey-soda.

Mr. Barry looked tired. Tired of life? I can’t say with certainty. However, if I had to guess, the medical team’s heroics meant nothing to him. Unfortunately, he was not awake like Harry and could not do what he wished. I wondered what snippets of his life flashed before him as he lay on his bed at home for days. Did he want to have a whiskey-soda before dying? But we are not letting him die. Not easily anyway. We have to do everything we can: medications, coronary angiogram, dialysis, multiple rounds of CPR. Why?

In this country, we need permission to forgo CPR. If there are no advanced directives or next of kin available to discuss end-of-life care, performing CPR is the default status for all hospitalized patients, irrespective of the underlying severity of the illness. A unilateral DNR order written by a physician in good conscience (in a medically futile situation), but to which the patient has not consented, is generally invalid in most U.S. states. If health directives are not available, CPR will be administered on the presumption that the patient would want us to “do everything we can.” The medicolegal consequences and fear of not administering CPR is more profound than being found wrong and defying a patient’s wishes against CPR.

In patients with outside-hospital cardiac arrest, especially if related to ventricular fibrillation, early bystander CPR improves the survival rate. Hence, it makes sense for first responders and paramedics to administer CPR as the default option, focusing on the technique, rather than thinking about its utility based on the patient’s underlying comorbidities.

In the inpatient setting, however, physicians have enough information to comprehensively evaluate the patient. In a cohort of 5,690 critically ill ICU patients, obtained from a U.S. registry, the rate of survival to discharge after inpatient cardiac arrest is very low at 12.5%. Chronic health conditions, malignancy, end-stage renal disease, multiorgan dysfunction, need for vasopressor support, prior CPR, initial rhythm of asystole, or PEA advanced age were all associated with a less than 10% survival rate after CPR.

Dying is a process. Administering CPR to a dying patient is of little to no value. For Mr. Barry, it resulted in a bruised chest and broken ribs. James R. Jude, MD, one of the pioneers of closed chest compression, or modern-day CPR, wrote in 1965 that “resuscitation of the dying patient with irreparable damage to lungs, heart, kidneys, brain or any other vital system of the body has no medical, ethical, or moral justification. The techniques described in this monograph were designed to resuscitate the victim of acute insult, whether be it from drowning, electrical shock, untoward effect of drugs, anesthetic accident, heart block, acute myocardial infarction, or surgery.”

Yet, doctors continue to provide futile treatments at end of life for a variety of reasons: concerns about medico-legal risks, discomfort or inexperience with death and dying, uncertainty in prognostication, family requests, and organizational barriers such as lack of palliative services that can help lead end-of-life care discussions. Despite knowing that CPR has little benefit in critically ill patients with terminal illness and multiorgan dysfunction, we often ask the patient and their surrogate decision-makers: “If your heart stops, do you want us to restore your heart by pressing on the chest and giving electric shocks?” The very act of asking the question implies that CPR may be beneficial. We often do not go over the risks or offer an opinion on whether CPR should be performed. We take a neutral stance.

Anoxic brain injury, pain from broken ribs, and low likelihood of survival to discharge with acceptable neurologic recovery are rarely discussed in detail. Laypeople may overestimate the chances of survival after CPR and they may not comprehend that it does not reverse the dying process in patients with a terminal illness. When you ask about CPR, most families hear: “Do you want your loved one to live?” and the answer is nearly always “Yes.” We then administer CPR, thinking that we are respecting the patient’s autonomy in the medical decision-making process. However, in end-of-life care, elderly patients or surrogates may not fully understand the complexities involved or the outcomes of CPR. So, are we truly respecting their autonomy?
 

When to offer CPR?

In 2011, Billings and Krakauer, palliative care specialists from Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, suggested that we focus on understanding our patient’s values and goals of care, and then decide whether to offer CPR, rather than taking a neutral stance. With this approach, we continue to respect the patient’s autonomy and also affirm our responsibility in providing care consistent with medical reality. We need to have the humility to accept that death is inevitable. Taking care of the dying to ensure a peaceful and dignified death is as much our moral and ethical responsibility as respecting a patient’s autonomy.

It has been 10 years since a group of physicians from Columbia University Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, MGH, and Boston Children’s Hospital proposed changes to how we determine resuscitation status. Instead of assuming that CPR is always wanted, they suggested three distinct approaches: consider CPR when the benefits versus risks are uncertain, and the patient is not end stage; recommend against CPR when there is a low likelihood of benefit and high likelihood of harm (e.g., patients with anoxic brain injury, advanced incurable cancer, or end-stage multiorgan dysfunction); and do not offer CPR to patients who will die imminently and have no chance of surviving CPR (e.g., patients with multiorgan dysfunction, increasing pressor requirements, and those who are actively dying without a single immediately reversible cause). I agree with their proposal.

Mr. Barry was actively dying. Unfortunately, we had neither his advanced directives nor access to family members or surrogates to discuss values and goals of care. Given the futility of administering CPR again, and based on our humanitarian principles, a moral and ethical responsibility to ensure a peaceful dying process, I and another ICU attending placed the DNR order. He passed away, peacefully, within a few hours.

That evening, as I was sitting on my porch reading the last page of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” my phone pinged. It was an email asking me to complete the final attestation for the death certificate. I imagined that Mr. Barry knew where he was going. He probably had his own special place – something beautiful and majestic, great and tall, dazzlingly white in the hot sun, like the snow-capped mountain of Kilimanjaro that Harry saw at the time of his death.

Dr. Mallidi is a general cardiologist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, UCSF. He disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Some details have been changed to protect the patient’s identity.

The first thing I noticed about Mr. Barry as I entered the intensive care unit was his left foot: Half of it was black, shriveled, and gangrenous, jutting out from under the white blanket. The soft rays of the morning sun illuminated his gaunt, unshaven, hollow cheeks. Sedated on propofol, with a green endotracheal tube sticking out of his chapped lips, he looked frail. His nurse, Becky, had just cleaned him after he passed tarry, maroon-colored stool. As she turned him over, I saw that the skin over his tailbone was broken. He had a large decubitus ulcer, the edges of which were now dried and black. The Foley bag, hanging next to his bed, was empty; there had been no urine for several hours now.

No one knew much about Mr. Barry. I don’t mean his current medical status – I mean what he did in life, who he loved, whether he had kids, what he valued. All we knew was that he was 83 years old and lived alone. No prior records in our system. No advanced directives. No information on any family. One of his neighbors called 911 after he was not seen for at least 10 days. Emergency medical services found Mr. Barry in bed, nearly lifeless. In the emergency room, he was noted to be in shock, with a dangerously low blood pressure. He was dry as a bone with markedly elevated sodium levels. His laboratory makers for kidney and liver function were deranged. He was admitted to the medical ICU with a diagnosis of hypovolemic shock and/or septic shock with multiorgan dysfunction. With 48 hours of supportive management with intravenous fluids and antibiotics, he did not improve. Blood cultures were positive for gram-positive cocci. The doses for medications used to maintain the blood pressure increased steadily. He also developed gastrointestinal bleeding.
 

Futile vs. potentially inappropriate

I was called for a cardiology consult because he had transient ST elevation in inferolateral leads on the monitor. Given his clinical scenario, the likelihood of type 1 myocardial infarction from plaque rupture was low; the ST elevations were probably related to vasospasm from increasing pressor requirement. Diagnostic cardiac catheterization showed clean coronary arteries. Continuous renal replacement therapy was soon started. Given Mr Barry’s multiorgan dysfunction and extremely poor prognosis, I recommended making all efforts to find his family or surrogate decision-maker to discuss goals of care or having a two-physician sign-off to place a DNR order.

Despite all efforts, we could not trace the family. We physicians vary individually on how we define value as related to life. We also vary on the degree of uncertainty about prognostication that we are comfortable with. This is one of the reasons the term “futility” is controversial and there is a push to use “potentially inappropriate” instead. The primary team had a different threshold for placing a DNR order and did not do it. That night, after I left the hospital, Mr Barry had a PEA (pulseless electrical activity) arrest and was resuscitated after 10 minutes of CPR. The next day, I noticed his bruised chest. He was on multiple medications to support his blood pressure.
 

My patient and a Hemingway protagonist

Whether by coincidence or irony, I started reading Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” the same day that I met Mr. Barry. He reminded me of the story’s protagonist, Harry, lying on the cot with a gangrenous leg, waiting to die. Harry could sense death approaching. He reminisced about his past. All he wanted was to drink his “whiskey-soda.” “Darling, don’t drink that. We have to do everything we can,” his wife said. “You do it. I am tired,” Harry said, and continued to drink his whiskey-soda.

Mr. Barry looked tired. Tired of life? I can’t say with certainty. However, if I had to guess, the medical team’s heroics meant nothing to him. Unfortunately, he was not awake like Harry and could not do what he wished. I wondered what snippets of his life flashed before him as he lay on his bed at home for days. Did he want to have a whiskey-soda before dying? But we are not letting him die. Not easily anyway. We have to do everything we can: medications, coronary angiogram, dialysis, multiple rounds of CPR. Why?

In this country, we need permission to forgo CPR. If there are no advanced directives or next of kin available to discuss end-of-life care, performing CPR is the default status for all hospitalized patients, irrespective of the underlying severity of the illness. A unilateral DNR order written by a physician in good conscience (in a medically futile situation), but to which the patient has not consented, is generally invalid in most U.S. states. If health directives are not available, CPR will be administered on the presumption that the patient would want us to “do everything we can.” The medicolegal consequences and fear of not administering CPR is more profound than being found wrong and defying a patient’s wishes against CPR.

In patients with outside-hospital cardiac arrest, especially if related to ventricular fibrillation, early bystander CPR improves the survival rate. Hence, it makes sense for first responders and paramedics to administer CPR as the default option, focusing on the technique, rather than thinking about its utility based on the patient’s underlying comorbidities.

In the inpatient setting, however, physicians have enough information to comprehensively evaluate the patient. In a cohort of 5,690 critically ill ICU patients, obtained from a U.S. registry, the rate of survival to discharge after inpatient cardiac arrest is very low at 12.5%. Chronic health conditions, malignancy, end-stage renal disease, multiorgan dysfunction, need for vasopressor support, prior CPR, initial rhythm of asystole, or PEA advanced age were all associated with a less than 10% survival rate after CPR.

Dying is a process. Administering CPR to a dying patient is of little to no value. For Mr. Barry, it resulted in a bruised chest and broken ribs. James R. Jude, MD, one of the pioneers of closed chest compression, or modern-day CPR, wrote in 1965 that “resuscitation of the dying patient with irreparable damage to lungs, heart, kidneys, brain or any other vital system of the body has no medical, ethical, or moral justification. The techniques described in this monograph were designed to resuscitate the victim of acute insult, whether be it from drowning, electrical shock, untoward effect of drugs, anesthetic accident, heart block, acute myocardial infarction, or surgery.”

Yet, doctors continue to provide futile treatments at end of life for a variety of reasons: concerns about medico-legal risks, discomfort or inexperience with death and dying, uncertainty in prognostication, family requests, and organizational barriers such as lack of palliative services that can help lead end-of-life care discussions. Despite knowing that CPR has little benefit in critically ill patients with terminal illness and multiorgan dysfunction, we often ask the patient and their surrogate decision-makers: “If your heart stops, do you want us to restore your heart by pressing on the chest and giving electric shocks?” The very act of asking the question implies that CPR may be beneficial. We often do not go over the risks or offer an opinion on whether CPR should be performed. We take a neutral stance.

Anoxic brain injury, pain from broken ribs, and low likelihood of survival to discharge with acceptable neurologic recovery are rarely discussed in detail. Laypeople may overestimate the chances of survival after CPR and they may not comprehend that it does not reverse the dying process in patients with a terminal illness. When you ask about CPR, most families hear: “Do you want your loved one to live?” and the answer is nearly always “Yes.” We then administer CPR, thinking that we are respecting the patient’s autonomy in the medical decision-making process. However, in end-of-life care, elderly patients or surrogates may not fully understand the complexities involved or the outcomes of CPR. So, are we truly respecting their autonomy?
 

When to offer CPR?

In 2011, Billings and Krakauer, palliative care specialists from Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, suggested that we focus on understanding our patient’s values and goals of care, and then decide whether to offer CPR, rather than taking a neutral stance. With this approach, we continue to respect the patient’s autonomy and also affirm our responsibility in providing care consistent with medical reality. We need to have the humility to accept that death is inevitable. Taking care of the dying to ensure a peaceful and dignified death is as much our moral and ethical responsibility as respecting a patient’s autonomy.

It has been 10 years since a group of physicians from Columbia University Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, MGH, and Boston Children’s Hospital proposed changes to how we determine resuscitation status. Instead of assuming that CPR is always wanted, they suggested three distinct approaches: consider CPR when the benefits versus risks are uncertain, and the patient is not end stage; recommend against CPR when there is a low likelihood of benefit and high likelihood of harm (e.g., patients with anoxic brain injury, advanced incurable cancer, or end-stage multiorgan dysfunction); and do not offer CPR to patients who will die imminently and have no chance of surviving CPR (e.g., patients with multiorgan dysfunction, increasing pressor requirements, and those who are actively dying without a single immediately reversible cause). I agree with their proposal.

Mr. Barry was actively dying. Unfortunately, we had neither his advanced directives nor access to family members or surrogates to discuss values and goals of care. Given the futility of administering CPR again, and based on our humanitarian principles, a moral and ethical responsibility to ensure a peaceful dying process, I and another ICU attending placed the DNR order. He passed away, peacefully, within a few hours.

That evening, as I was sitting on my porch reading the last page of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” my phone pinged. It was an email asking me to complete the final attestation for the death certificate. I imagined that Mr. Barry knew where he was going. He probably had his own special place – something beautiful and majestic, great and tall, dazzlingly white in the hot sun, like the snow-capped mountain of Kilimanjaro that Harry saw at the time of his death.

Dr. Mallidi is a general cardiologist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, UCSF. He disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

The likelihood that a child will survive a near-drowning without long-term damage is substantially greater if a bystander attempts a rescue, even if that person doesn’t perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), according to new research presented October 10 at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 2021 National Conference.

“The extent to which bystander rescue is associated with reduced odds of unfavorable drowning outcomes was surprising,” said lead investigator Rohit P. Shenoi, MD, professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and attending physician at Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston.

“While we do know that early rescue and resuscitation is helpful in preventing severe drowning injury, the degree of benefit from bystander rescue in all cases of pediatric drowning has not been described so far,” he told this news organization.

The fact that a bystander’s rescue attempt improves a child’s odds of a good outcome is not surprising on its own, but the magnitude of the finding really affirms the importance of bystander intervention, said Benjamin Hoffman, MD, professor of pediatrics at the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine and medical director of the Tom Sargent Safety Center at the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, Portland.

“If an adult finds a child in the water, even if they don’t administer formal CPR, they’re going to be doing things” to try to help, Dr. Hoffman, who was not involved in this research but who specializes in child injury prevention, said in an interview. The act of intervening – whether it’s formal CPR or a CPR attempt or even just calling appropriate first responders – “likely impacts the duration of the submersion” and “clearly makes a difference.”

Drowning is the leading cause of death for children younger than 4 years, Dr. Hoffman noted, adding that the AAP recommends swimming lessons for children older than 1 year to reduce that risk.

In their cross-sectional study, Dr. Shenoi and his colleagues analyzed data on drownings and near-drownings in children and adolescents younger than 18 years using hospital, emergency medical services, and child fatality records from Harris County, Texas.

They analyzed 237 incidents from 2010 to 2013 in which the young person was submerged. Median age of the victims was 3.2 years, 60% were male, 64% were Black, Hispanic, or Native American, and 78% occurred in a swimming pool.

Unfavorable outcomes – defined as death or severe impairment after hospital discharge – were experienced by 38 victims (16%) and were significantly associated with being submerged for longer than 5 minutes (P < .001).

The odds of an unfavorable outcome dropped by 80% if a bystander attempted a rescue, whether or not they performed CPR (adjusted odds ratio, 0.2; P = .004). If the bystander performed CPR, the odds of an unfavorable outcome dropped by a similar amount, but the difference was not statistically significant (aOR, 0.22; P = .07).

However, previous research has shown a significant reduction in poor outcomes when CPR is administered to children who have been submerged, Dr. Hoffman explained.

The most important thing a bystander can do is simply get a submerged child out of the water. “Early rescue in drowning terminates what is initially a respiratory arrest from progressing to a full cardiopulmonary arrest with severe hypoxic brain injury and death,” Dr. Shenoi said.

“CPR is also very important, and rescue and resuscitation go hand in hand. We encourage all laypersons to be trained in CPR so that they can administer correct CPR techniques,” he added.

Both Dr. Shenoi and Dr. Hoffman emphasized the value of CPR training for adults, as the AAP recommends, and the importance of other precautions that reduce the risk of drowning.

“Drowning prevention should consist of multiple layers of prevention,” Dr. Shenoi said. These consist of “close, constant, and attentive supervision; isolation fencing for swimming pools; and water competency, including water-safety knowledge, basic swim skills, and the ability to recognize and respond to a swimmer in trouble, use of life jackets, and early bystander CPR.”

The relative importance of each of those layers depends on geography and circumstances, Dr. Hoffman said. Pools are the most common drowning sites in the United States overall, but they’re much more common in warmer states, such as California, Florida, and Texas, which have more pools. In contrast, drownings in Oregon are more likely to occur in rivers, so prevention is more about access to life jackets and increasing access to swim lessons.

The findings from this study drive home how important it is for physicians to provide anticipatory guidance to families on reducing the risk of drowning. Pediatricians should convey to families the need for different layers of protection, he added.

“If your family spends a lot of time around water, whether open water or swimming pools, the more layers you can provide, the better off you’re going to be,” Dr. Hoffman said.

Dr. Shenoi echoed this sentiment.

“The take-home message is to be observant if you are entrusted with the care of a child around water,” Dr. Shenoi said. “If you notice the child to be drowning, either attempt rescue yourself if it is safe to do so or enlist the help of others to save the victim as soon as possible. However, the rescuer should not place himself or herself in danger when attempting rescue.”

The five steps in the “drowning chain of survival” – preventing drowning, recognizing distress, providing flotation, removing the victim from the water, and providing care and CPR as needed – are key to reducing drowning deaths and injury, Dr. Shenoi emphasized.

Dr. Shenoi has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Dr. Hoffman is a paid consultant on child drowning prevention for the nonprofit Anonymous Philanthropy.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

The likelihood that a child will survive a near-drowning without long-term damage is substantially greater if a bystander attempts a rescue, even if that person doesn’t perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), according to new research presented October 10 at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 2021 National Conference.

“The extent to which bystander rescue is associated with reduced odds of unfavorable drowning outcomes was surprising,” said lead investigator Rohit P. Shenoi, MD, professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and attending physician at Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston.

“While we do know that early rescue and resuscitation is helpful in preventing severe drowning injury, the degree of benefit from bystander rescue in all cases of pediatric drowning has not been described so far,” he told this news organization.

The fact that a bystander’s rescue attempt improves a child’s odds of a good outcome is not surprising on its own, but the magnitude of the finding really affirms the importance of bystander intervention, said Benjamin Hoffman, MD, professor of pediatrics at the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine and medical director of the Tom Sargent Safety Center at the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, Portland.

“If an adult finds a child in the water, even if they don’t administer formal CPR, they’re going to be doing things” to try to help, Dr. Hoffman, who was not involved in this research but who specializes in child injury prevention, said in an interview. The act of intervening – whether it’s formal CPR or a CPR attempt or even just calling appropriate first responders – “likely impacts the duration of the submersion” and “clearly makes a difference.”

Drowning is the leading cause of death for children younger than 4 years, Dr. Hoffman noted, adding that the AAP recommends swimming lessons for children older than 1 year to reduce that risk.

In their cross-sectional study, Dr. Shenoi and his colleagues analyzed data on drownings and near-drownings in children and adolescents younger than 18 years using hospital, emergency medical services, and child fatality records from Harris County, Texas.

They analyzed 237 incidents from 2010 to 2013 in which the young person was submerged. Median age of the victims was 3.2 years, 60% were male, 64% were Black, Hispanic, or Native American, and 78% occurred in a swimming pool.

Unfavorable outcomes – defined as death or severe impairment after hospital discharge – were experienced by 38 victims (16%) and were significantly associated with being submerged for longer than 5 minutes (P < .001).

The odds of an unfavorable outcome dropped by 80% if a bystander attempted a rescue, whether or not they performed CPR (adjusted odds ratio, 0.2; P = .004). If the bystander performed CPR, the odds of an unfavorable outcome dropped by a similar amount, but the difference was not statistically significant (aOR, 0.22; P = .07).

However, previous research has shown a significant reduction in poor outcomes when CPR is administered to children who have been submerged, Dr. Hoffman explained.

The most important thing a bystander can do is simply get a submerged child out of the water. “Early rescue in drowning terminates what is initially a respiratory arrest from progressing to a full cardiopulmonary arrest with severe hypoxic brain injury and death,” Dr. Shenoi said.

“CPR is also very important, and rescue and resuscitation go hand in hand. We encourage all laypersons to be trained in CPR so that they can administer correct CPR techniques,” he added.

Both Dr. Shenoi and Dr. Hoffman emphasized the value of CPR training for adults, as the AAP recommends, and the importance of other precautions that reduce the risk of drowning.

“Drowning prevention should consist of multiple layers of prevention,” Dr. Shenoi said. These consist of “close, constant, and attentive supervision; isolation fencing for swimming pools; and water competency, including water-safety knowledge, basic swim skills, and the ability to recognize and respond to a swimmer in trouble, use of life jackets, and early bystander CPR.”

The relative importance of each of those layers depends on geography and circumstances, Dr. Hoffman said. Pools are the most common drowning sites in the United States overall, but they’re much more common in warmer states, such as California, Florida, and Texas, which have more pools. In contrast, drownings in Oregon are more likely to occur in rivers, so prevention is more about access to life jackets and increasing access to swim lessons.

The findings from this study drive home how important it is for physicians to provide anticipatory guidance to families on reducing the risk of drowning. Pediatricians should convey to families the need for different layers of protection, he added.

“If your family spends a lot of time around water, whether open water or swimming pools, the more layers you can provide, the better off you’re going to be,” Dr. Hoffman said.

Dr. Shenoi echoed this sentiment.

“The take-home message is to be observant if you are entrusted with the care of a child around water,” Dr. Shenoi said. “If you notice the child to be drowning, either attempt rescue yourself if it is safe to do so or enlist the help of others to save the victim as soon as possible. However, the rescuer should not place himself or herself in danger when attempting rescue.”

The five steps in the “drowning chain of survival” – preventing drowning, recognizing distress, providing flotation, removing the victim from the water, and providing care and CPR as needed – are key to reducing drowning deaths and injury, Dr. Shenoi emphasized.

Dr. Shenoi has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Dr. Hoffman is a paid consultant on child drowning prevention for the nonprofit Anonymous Philanthropy.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

The likelihood that a child will survive a near-drowning without long-term damage is substantially greater if a bystander attempts a rescue, even if that person doesn’t perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), according to new research presented October 10 at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 2021 National Conference.

“The extent to which bystander rescue is associated with reduced odds of unfavorable drowning outcomes was surprising,” said lead investigator Rohit P. Shenoi, MD, professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and attending physician at Texas Children’s Hospital, Houston.

“While we do know that early rescue and resuscitation is helpful in preventing severe drowning injury, the degree of benefit from bystander rescue in all cases of pediatric drowning has not been described so far,” he told this news organization.

The fact that a bystander’s rescue attempt improves a child’s odds of a good outcome is not surprising on its own, but the magnitude of the finding really affirms the importance of bystander intervention, said Benjamin Hoffman, MD, professor of pediatrics at the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine and medical director of the Tom Sargent Safety Center at the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, Portland.

“If an adult finds a child in the water, even if they don’t administer formal CPR, they’re going to be doing things” to try to help, Dr. Hoffman, who was not involved in this research but who specializes in child injury prevention, said in an interview. The act of intervening – whether it’s formal CPR or a CPR attempt or even just calling appropriate first responders – “likely impacts the duration of the submersion” and “clearly makes a difference.”

Drowning is the leading cause of death for children younger than 4 years, Dr. Hoffman noted, adding that the AAP recommends swimming lessons for children older than 1 year to reduce that risk.

In their cross-sectional study, Dr. Shenoi and his colleagues analyzed data on drownings and near-drownings in children and adolescents younger than 18 years using hospital, emergency medical services, and child fatality records from Harris County, Texas.

They analyzed 237 incidents from 2010 to 2013 in which the young person was submerged. Median age of the victims was 3.2 years, 60% were male, 64% were Black, Hispanic, or Native American, and 78% occurred in a swimming pool.

Unfavorable outcomes – defined as death or severe impairment after hospital discharge – were experienced by 38 victims (16%) and were significantly associated with being submerged for longer than 5 minutes (P < .001).

The odds of an unfavorable outcome dropped by 80% if a bystander attempted a rescue, whether or not they performed CPR (adjusted odds ratio, 0.2; P = .004). If the bystander performed CPR, the odds of an unfavorable outcome dropped by a similar amount, but the difference was not statistically significant (aOR, 0.22; P = .07).

However, previous research has shown a significant reduction in poor outcomes when CPR is administered to children who have been submerged, Dr. Hoffman explained.

The most important thing a bystander can do is simply get a submerged child out of the water. “Early rescue in drowning terminates what is initially a respiratory arrest from progressing to a full cardiopulmonary arrest with severe hypoxic brain injury and death,” Dr. Shenoi said.

“CPR is also very important, and rescue and resuscitation go hand in hand. We encourage all laypersons to be trained in CPR so that they can administer correct CPR techniques,” he added.

Both Dr. Shenoi and Dr. Hoffman emphasized the value of CPR training for adults, as the AAP recommends, and the importance of other precautions that reduce the risk of drowning.

“Drowning prevention should consist of multiple layers of prevention,” Dr. Shenoi said. These consist of “close, constant, and attentive supervision; isolation fencing for swimming pools; and water competency, including water-safety knowledge, basic swim skills, and the ability to recognize and respond to a swimmer in trouble, use of life jackets, and early bystander CPR.”

The relative importance of each of those layers depends on geography and circumstances, Dr. Hoffman said. Pools are the most common drowning sites in the United States overall, but they’re much more common in warmer states, such as California, Florida, and Texas, which have more pools. In contrast, drownings in Oregon are more likely to occur in rivers, so prevention is more about access to life jackets and increasing access to swim lessons.

The findings from this study drive home how important it is for physicians to provide anticipatory guidance to families on reducing the risk of drowning. Pediatricians should convey to families the need for different layers of protection, he added.

“If your family spends a lot of time around water, whether open water or swimming pools, the more layers you can provide, the better off you’re going to be,” Dr. Hoffman said.

Dr. Shenoi echoed this sentiment.

“The take-home message is to be observant if you are entrusted with the care of a child around water,” Dr. Shenoi said. “If you notice the child to be drowning, either attempt rescue yourself if it is safe to do so or enlist the help of others to save the victim as soon as possible. However, the rescuer should not place himself or herself in danger when attempting rescue.”

The five steps in the “drowning chain of survival” – preventing drowning, recognizing distress, providing flotation, removing the victim from the water, and providing care and CPR as needed – are key to reducing drowning deaths and injury, Dr. Shenoi emphasized.

Dr. Shenoi has disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Dr. Hoffman is a paid consultant on child drowning prevention for the nonprofit Anonymous Philanthropy.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Children who receive CPR with both rescue breathing and compressions from a bystander have greater odds of survival without serious brain damage than if they receive CPR with compressions only, according to a study published online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Specifically, a child has a 61% better chance of surviving with good neurologic outcomes if they receive compression-only CPR versus no bystander resuscitation, but that child is more than twice as likely to survive if he or she receives rescue breathing as well.

The study’s clinical implications are most important for bystander CPR training, lead author Maryam Y. Naim, MD, MSCE, of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia, told this news organization.

“Many programs teach compression-only CPR to lay rescuers, and there should be a renewed emphasis on rescue breathing for the possibility a lay rescuer has to perform CPR on a child,” Dr. Naim said.

That said, if a bystander is unfamiliar with how to properly administer rescue breathing or has concerns about hygiene or infection on someone they don’t know, Dr. Naim advises doing compression-only CPR, especially if the child is older than age 1 year. “If a child is younger than a year of age please consider giving rescue breaths with chest compressions,” she added.

Dr. Naim and colleagues analyzed 13,060 pediatric out-of-hospital cardiac arrests from the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival database, which includes data from 911 call centers, emergency medical services (EMS) providers, and receiving hospitals across 28 states. The data sample included all cases age 18 years or younger who experienced nontraumatic out-of-hospital cardiac arrest between January 2013 and December 2019, excluding those with obvious signs of death or a “do not resuscitate” order.

“Because the etiology of cardiac arrest in children is difficult to determine, especially in cases that result in death, all nontraumatic cases were included regardless of presumed etiology, including respiratory, cardiac, drowning, electrocution, or other,” the authors wrote. The researchers defined neurologically favorable survival, the primary endpoint, as “a cerebral performance category score of 1 (no neurologic disability) or 2 (moderate disability)” at discharge. Neurologically unfavorable survival included a score of 3 (severe disability), 4 (coma or vegetative state), or death. 

Among the 10,429 cases ultimately analyzed after exclusions and missing data, 46.5% received bystander CPR. Slightly more than half of these (55.6%) received compression-only CPR while the other 45.3% received rescue-breathing CPR.

Dr. Naim was surprised that compression-only CPR was the most common form of CPR given to children with cardiac arrest because the current American Heart Association/International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation recommendations note rescue breathing as the preferred form in children.

That preference exists because respiratory failure occurs more often in children than in adults as a cause of cardiac arrest, explained Sandra Weiss, MD, an interventional cardiologist and the medical director of the cardiac intensive care unit at ChristianaCare’s Christiana Hospital in Newark, Del.

Because of that, “it’s not surprising that if you give respiratory resuscitation to a child who’s arresting from a respiratory cause that they’re going to do better than if you just do chest compressions,” said Dr. Weiss, who was not involved in the study.

The study found the most common presumed cause of arrest to be cardiac, occurring in 44.4% of cases, but it was closely followed by respiratory in nearly one-third of cases (32.8%).

Infants younger than age 1 year were the most common age group to have a cardiac arrest, making up more than all other ages combined. Most out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occurred in a home and were observed by someone when they happened. While rates of bystander CPR did not change during the study’s 6-year period, the incidence of compression-only CPR increased. Lay people without medical training provided the CPR in 93.6% of cases.

Only 8.6% of cardiac arrest cases resulted in neurologically favorable survival, a rate which remained steady throughout the study period. The rate increased with increasing age, at 4.6% of infants, 10.6% of children, and 16.5% of adolescents.

Those who received CPR with rescue breathing had more than double the odds of neurologically favorable survival than if they hadn’t received CPR at all (adjusted odds ratio, 2.16). Survival with a positive neurologic outcome was 1.6 times more likely with compression-only CPR than no CPR (aOR, 1.61). When researchers compared the two forms of CPR, inclusion of rescue breathing increased the child’s likelihood of survival without neurologic sequelae by 36% (aOR, 1.36).

Despite these findings, however, Dr. Weiss agrees with Dr. Naim that offering compression-only CPR is preferable to offering no CPR at all.

“All resuscitation is better than no resuscitation, regardless of whether it’s compression only or respiratory breathing,” Dr. Weiss said in an interview. “The average lay person is probably going to do the easiest thing, and survivability is going to be increased by doing anything rather than nothing.”

Dr. Weiss also noted that it’s easier to instruct people how to do chest compressions, especially, for example, during an emergency phone call with a dispatcher while waiting for EMS to arrive.

“It’s absolutely imperative for people to get the basics, and the basics are compressions,” she said. “That’s really what is the most vital component of all resuscitative efforts, regardless of whether it’s adult or pediatrics.”

Dr. Weiss also acknowledges that laypeople may feel particularly less comfortable administering rescue breaths to a child they don’t know in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even if the odds are low that the specific child experiencing a cardiac arrest is necessarily infectious, the AHA guidelines include the caveat that, “if there’s a concern for infection transmissibility, that compression only is acceptable,” Dr. Weiss said. “It’s a reality for our current state.”

The superiority of rescue-breathing CPR to compression-only CPR was true across all age groups, but compression-only CPR still resulted in better survival odds than no CPR at all for all age groups except infants, in whom only rescue breathing was associated with a statistically significant increased likelihood of neurologically favorable survival.

Protective factors for positive outcomes included being younger than age 1 year, the arrest being witnessed, and a having shockable rhythm. Risk factors reducing survival included being Black, being in a home, and cardiac arrests linked with automated external defibrillator use before EMS arrived.

The CARES program was previously funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is now funded by the American Red Cross, the AHA, Stryker, and Emory University. Dr. Naim was further supported by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the American Red Cross. The authors and Dr. Weiss disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Children who receive CPR with both rescue breathing and compressions from a bystander have greater odds of survival without serious brain damage than if they receive CPR with compressions only, according to a study published online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Specifically, a child has a 61% better chance of surviving with good neurologic outcomes if they receive compression-only CPR versus no bystander resuscitation, but that child is more than twice as likely to survive if he or she receives rescue breathing as well.

The study’s clinical implications are most important for bystander CPR training, lead author Maryam Y. Naim, MD, MSCE, of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia, told this news organization.

“Many programs teach compression-only CPR to lay rescuers, and there should be a renewed emphasis on rescue breathing for the possibility a lay rescuer has to perform CPR on a child,” Dr. Naim said.

That said, if a bystander is unfamiliar with how to properly administer rescue breathing or has concerns about hygiene or infection on someone they don’t know, Dr. Naim advises doing compression-only CPR, especially if the child is older than age 1 year. “If a child is younger than a year of age please consider giving rescue breaths with chest compressions,” she added.

Dr. Naim and colleagues analyzed 13,060 pediatric out-of-hospital cardiac arrests from the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival database, which includes data from 911 call centers, emergency medical services (EMS) providers, and receiving hospitals across 28 states. The data sample included all cases age 18 years or younger who experienced nontraumatic out-of-hospital cardiac arrest between January 2013 and December 2019, excluding those with obvious signs of death or a “do not resuscitate” order.

“Because the etiology of cardiac arrest in children is difficult to determine, especially in cases that result in death, all nontraumatic cases were included regardless of presumed etiology, including respiratory, cardiac, drowning, electrocution, or other,” the authors wrote. The researchers defined neurologically favorable survival, the primary endpoint, as “a cerebral performance category score of 1 (no neurologic disability) or 2 (moderate disability)” at discharge. Neurologically unfavorable survival included a score of 3 (severe disability), 4 (coma or vegetative state), or death. 

Among the 10,429 cases ultimately analyzed after exclusions and missing data, 46.5% received bystander CPR. Slightly more than half of these (55.6%) received compression-only CPR while the other 45.3% received rescue-breathing CPR.

Dr. Naim was surprised that compression-only CPR was the most common form of CPR given to children with cardiac arrest because the current American Heart Association/International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation recommendations note rescue breathing as the preferred form in children.

That preference exists because respiratory failure occurs more often in children than in adults as a cause of cardiac arrest, explained Sandra Weiss, MD, an interventional cardiologist and the medical director of the cardiac intensive care unit at ChristianaCare’s Christiana Hospital in Newark, Del.

Because of that, “it’s not surprising that if you give respiratory resuscitation to a child who’s arresting from a respiratory cause that they’re going to do better than if you just do chest compressions,” said Dr. Weiss, who was not involved in the study.

The study found the most common presumed cause of arrest to be cardiac, occurring in 44.4% of cases, but it was closely followed by respiratory in nearly one-third of cases (32.8%).

Infants younger than age 1 year were the most common age group to have a cardiac arrest, making up more than all other ages combined. Most out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occurred in a home and were observed by someone when they happened. While rates of bystander CPR did not change during the study’s 6-year period, the incidence of compression-only CPR increased. Lay people without medical training provided the CPR in 93.6% of cases.

Only 8.6% of cardiac arrest cases resulted in neurologically favorable survival, a rate which remained steady throughout the study period. The rate increased with increasing age, at 4.6% of infants, 10.6% of children, and 16.5% of adolescents.

Those who received CPR with rescue breathing had more than double the odds of neurologically favorable survival than if they hadn’t received CPR at all (adjusted odds ratio, 2.16). Survival with a positive neurologic outcome was 1.6 times more likely with compression-only CPR than no CPR (aOR, 1.61). When researchers compared the two forms of CPR, inclusion of rescue breathing increased the child’s likelihood of survival without neurologic sequelae by 36% (aOR, 1.36).

Despite these findings, however, Dr. Weiss agrees with Dr. Naim that offering compression-only CPR is preferable to offering no CPR at all.

“All resuscitation is better than no resuscitation, regardless of whether it’s compression only or respiratory breathing,” Dr. Weiss said in an interview. “The average lay person is probably going to do the easiest thing, and survivability is going to be increased by doing anything rather than nothing.”

Dr. Weiss also noted that it’s easier to instruct people how to do chest compressions, especially, for example, during an emergency phone call with a dispatcher while waiting for EMS to arrive.

“It’s absolutely imperative for people to get the basics, and the basics are compressions,” she said. “That’s really what is the most vital component of all resuscitative efforts, regardless of whether it’s adult or pediatrics.”

Dr. Weiss also acknowledges that laypeople may feel particularly less comfortable administering rescue breaths to a child they don’t know in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even if the odds are low that the specific child experiencing a cardiac arrest is necessarily infectious, the AHA guidelines include the caveat that, “if there’s a concern for infection transmissibility, that compression only is acceptable,” Dr. Weiss said. “It’s a reality for our current state.”

The superiority of rescue-breathing CPR to compression-only CPR was true across all age groups, but compression-only CPR still resulted in better survival odds than no CPR at all for all age groups except infants, in whom only rescue breathing was associated with a statistically significant increased likelihood of neurologically favorable survival.

Protective factors for positive outcomes included being younger than age 1 year, the arrest being witnessed, and a having shockable rhythm. Risk factors reducing survival included being Black, being in a home, and cardiac arrests linked with automated external defibrillator use before EMS arrived.

The CARES program was previously funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is now funded by the American Red Cross, the AHA, Stryker, and Emory University. Dr. Naim was further supported by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the American Red Cross. The authors and Dr. Weiss disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

Children who receive CPR with both rescue breathing and compressions from a bystander have greater odds of survival without serious brain damage than if they receive CPR with compressions only, according to a study published online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Specifically, a child has a 61% better chance of surviving with good neurologic outcomes if they receive compression-only CPR versus no bystander resuscitation, but that child is more than twice as likely to survive if he or she receives rescue breathing as well.

The study’s clinical implications are most important for bystander CPR training, lead author Maryam Y. Naim, MD, MSCE, of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia, told this news organization.

“Many programs teach compression-only CPR to lay rescuers, and there should be a renewed emphasis on rescue breathing for the possibility a lay rescuer has to perform CPR on a child,” Dr. Naim said.

That said, if a bystander is unfamiliar with how to properly administer rescue breathing or has concerns about hygiene or infection on someone they don’t know, Dr. Naim advises doing compression-only CPR, especially if the child is older than age 1 year. “If a child is younger than a year of age please consider giving rescue breaths with chest compressions,” she added.

Dr. Naim and colleagues analyzed 13,060 pediatric out-of-hospital cardiac arrests from the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival database, which includes data from 911 call centers, emergency medical services (EMS) providers, and receiving hospitals across 28 states. The data sample included all cases age 18 years or younger who experienced nontraumatic out-of-hospital cardiac arrest between January 2013 and December 2019, excluding those with obvious signs of death or a “do not resuscitate” order.

“Because the etiology of cardiac arrest in children is difficult to determine, especially in cases that result in death, all nontraumatic cases were included regardless of presumed etiology, including respiratory, cardiac, drowning, electrocution, or other,” the authors wrote. The researchers defined neurologically favorable survival, the primary endpoint, as “a cerebral performance category score of 1 (no neurologic disability) or 2 (moderate disability)” at discharge. Neurologically unfavorable survival included a score of 3 (severe disability), 4 (coma or vegetative state), or death. 

Among the 10,429 cases ultimately analyzed after exclusions and missing data, 46.5% received bystander CPR. Slightly more than half of these (55.6%) received compression-only CPR while the other 45.3% received rescue-breathing CPR.

Dr. Naim was surprised that compression-only CPR was the most common form of CPR given to children with cardiac arrest because the current American Heart Association/International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation recommendations note rescue breathing as the preferred form in children.

That preference exists because respiratory failure occurs more often in children than in adults as a cause of cardiac arrest, explained Sandra Weiss, MD, an interventional cardiologist and the medical director of the cardiac intensive care unit at ChristianaCare’s Christiana Hospital in Newark, Del.

Because of that, “it’s not surprising that if you give respiratory resuscitation to a child who’s arresting from a respiratory cause that they’re going to do better than if you just do chest compressions,” said Dr. Weiss, who was not involved in the study.

The study found the most common presumed cause of arrest to be cardiac, occurring in 44.4% of cases, but it was closely followed by respiratory in nearly one-third of cases (32.8%).

Infants younger than age 1 year were the most common age group to have a cardiac arrest, making up more than all other ages combined. Most out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occurred in a home and were observed by someone when they happened. While rates of bystander CPR did not change during the study’s 6-year period, the incidence of compression-only CPR increased. Lay people without medical training provided the CPR in 93.6% of cases.

Only 8.6% of cardiac arrest cases resulted in neurologically favorable survival, a rate which remained steady throughout the study period. The rate increased with increasing age, at 4.6% of infants, 10.6% of children, and 16.5% of adolescents.

Those who received CPR with rescue breathing had more than double the odds of neurologically favorable survival than if they hadn’t received CPR at all (adjusted odds ratio, 2.16). Survival with a positive neurologic outcome was 1.6 times more likely with compression-only CPR than no CPR (aOR, 1.61). When researchers compared the two forms of CPR, inclusion of rescue breathing increased the child’s likelihood of survival without neurologic sequelae by 36% (aOR, 1.36).

Despite these findings, however, Dr. Weiss agrees with Dr. Naim that offering compression-only CPR is preferable to offering no CPR at all.

“All resuscitation is better than no resuscitation, regardless of whether it’s compression only or respiratory breathing,” Dr. Weiss said in an interview. “The average lay person is probably going to do the easiest thing, and survivability is going to be increased by doing anything rather than nothing.”

Dr. Weiss also noted that it’s easier to instruct people how to do chest compressions, especially, for example, during an emergency phone call with a dispatcher while waiting for EMS to arrive.

“It’s absolutely imperative for people to get the basics, and the basics are compressions,” she said. “That’s really what is the most vital component of all resuscitative efforts, regardless of whether it’s adult or pediatrics.”

Dr. Weiss also acknowledges that laypeople may feel particularly less comfortable administering rescue breaths to a child they don’t know in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even if the odds are low that the specific child experiencing a cardiac arrest is necessarily infectious, the AHA guidelines include the caveat that, “if there’s a concern for infection transmissibility, that compression only is acceptable,” Dr. Weiss said. “It’s a reality for our current state.”

The superiority of rescue-breathing CPR to compression-only CPR was true across all age groups, but compression-only CPR still resulted in better survival odds than no CPR at all for all age groups except infants, in whom only rescue breathing was associated with a statistically significant increased likelihood of neurologically favorable survival.

Protective factors for positive outcomes included being younger than age 1 year, the arrest being witnessed, and a having shockable rhythm. Risk factors reducing survival included being Black, being in a home, and cardiac arrests linked with automated external defibrillator use before EMS arrived.

The CARES program was previously funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is now funded by the American Red Cross, the AHA, Stryker, and Emory University. Dr. Naim was further supported by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the American Red Cross. The authors and Dr. Weiss disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.