High School Soccer Player Dies Following First Practice of the Season

I wish they had reported whether a bystander administered CPR or someone used the AED that really has to be at the scene of a practice or actual contest in inter-mural sports.

Here's the problem: they don't all come back, and when you do what you are supposed to do.

Statistically, it's unlikely that the school has an AED at every game or practice, but I don't want to beat on their heads about this without knowing what the situation is.


Submitted by SCAFoundation on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 11:16am School News
PITTSBUGH--The first soccer practice of the season turned tragic for Beaver County Christian School, as 15-year-old sophomore Sam Dickson collapsed Monday morning at Brush Creek Park near Beaver Falls and was later pronounced dead at Ellwood City Hospital.

According to a release from the school's director of recruitment and advancement, Rose McChesney, Dickson collapsed during a break between drills as the practice was drawing to a close. Emergency crews arrived quickly, and he was transported to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 12:30 p.m.

"Naturally, we are in shock and grief over this event," the release said. "But along with his parents, we rejoice in Sam's vibrant faith and deep commitment to Christ. We grieve, but not as those 'Who have no hope,' as we read in 1 Thessalonians 4:13."

McChesney said there would be no further comment yesterday from the school administration or athletic department, with the school planning to handle the matter internally with Dickson's family.

Lawrence County deputy coroner Sam Teolis said an autopsy was performed, and the office should have the results in "hopefully, no more than a week."

Last fall, Dickson helped Beaver County Christian to a third-place finish in the WPIAL Class A playoffs and an appearance in the state quarterfinals, where he scored the team's only goal in a 3-1 loss to Mercyhurst Prep.

Josh Bostanic, who was a senior defender with Beaver County Christian last year, posted a piece of scripture and a message to Dickson on his Facebook wall.

"You will be missed Sam Dickson," it read.

SOURCE: PIttsburgh Tribune Review

Virtual Ventricle: Computer Predicts Dangers of Arrhythmia Drugs Better than Animal Testing

This is really important. We now have a far faster, less-expensive, more-accurate way of telling whether a new drug will cause heart problems.

Wow!

By Larry Greenemeier | September 1, 2011

Researchers developed a computer model of a human heart to study whether certain drugs will help treat an abnormal heartbeat, or cause serious side effects

Drugs useful in the long-term management of cardiac arrhythmia, which occurs when electrical impulses in the heart become irregular and put patients at risk of sudden death, have eluded researchers for decades. Despite best efforts, most of the medications developed to calm abnormally fast heartbeats, a type of arrhythmia known as tachyarrhythmia, have faltered. Several clinical trials, including the seminal 1986 Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial (CAST), even showed that the use of certain drugs designed to correct tachyarrhythmia—encainide and flecainide, in particular—actually increased the risk of death.

Arrhythmias cause nearly 250,000 deaths annually in the U.S. Tachyarrhythmia is triggered when an extra heartbeat develops in a person's normal cardiac cadence. Drugs like flecainide were expected to suppress the trigger that caused more heartbeats per minute but instead created conditions for the tachyarrhythmia to worsen. The problem with medications to treat this condition is their unpredictability—the drug lidocaine, for example, has proved beneficial in treating some types of tachyarrhythmia under certain conditions.

"There's been no way to screen what drugs would be most useful in a given clinical setting," says Colleen Clancy, an associate professor in the University of California, Davis, Department of Pharmacology. [Read more about cardiac computer modeling: "Using Computers to Model the Heart… Why Bother?"]

With this in mind, Clancy has been working with a team of researchers from Columbia University, Cornell University and The Johns Hopkins University to develop a computer model of a human heart that can help forecast at least some of the side effects of drugs used to treat certain tachyarrhythmias. Their goal is to create a "virtual drug-screening system that models drug-channel interactions and predicts the effects of drugs on emergent electrical activity in the heart," according to the study that Clancy and her colleagues published in the August 31 issue of Science Translational Medicine.

Heart cells generate electrical signals through ion channels in the cell membrane that open and close. These signals spread from cell to cell and manifest as electrical waves throughout the heart, telling the heart muscle to contract at regular intervals and pump blood to the brain and vital organs. To predict how antiarrhythmic drugs will alter cardiac rhythms, researchers must first determine how the drugs will interact with these ion channels.

Initially, it was thought that antiarrhythmics reduced electrical activity by plugging the ion channels. With the CAST and other studies calling those assumptions into question, Clancy and her colleagues developed mathematical equations representing the opening and closing of ion channels. They combined these with other mathematical algorithms to create a computer model of a human heart. Using data from experimental measurements of the action of the drugs flecainide and lidocaine, the researchers then introduced virtual representations of these antiarrhythmics to the heart model.

The simulation software was run on multiple high-performance computer clusters consisting of several servers working simultaneously to boost processing power. In one computer experiment, both drugs successfully slowed down heartbeats when the researchers tested the effects on individual heart cells. However, when tested on a virtual model of a whole heart in another computer-based experiment, flecainide created serious side effects by causing an arrhythmia, rather than preventing abnormal rhythms. These results were consistent with the CAST findings, which showed that patients given flecainide were two-to-three times more likely to experience lethal arrhythmias than placebo. "In the absence of those data, we wouldn't know if the model was behaving properly and we were making accurate predictions," Clancy says.

The results are significant for a number of reasons. For one, the researchers were able to simulate and test the effects of drugs over a wide range of concentrations, heart rates and arrhythmia triggers much more efficiently than they could if they had performed their study on lab animals. "We were testing those drugs in an environment that simulates a human heart," Clancy says. "The models aren't perfect, but they're more human than a mouse, and it's well known that drugs exhibit species-dependent effects. Until a time when we can test in humans, and I don't see that happening anytime soon, this may be the next best thing."

A future version of the software might also be used to screen out drug compounds that are problematic as well as identify those that have potential well before expensive animal and, later, human trials are conducted. "The model could even be used to identify ideal therapeutics—the properties that a drug needs to have to be useful in a particular clinical setting," Clancy says.

Within five years the researchers want to create a database documenting the behavior of all prototypical drugs used to treat different types of arrhythmia, including bradyarrhythmia, characterized by an abnormally slow heart rate. The new models that result might also be used to reveal the mechanisms driving common side effects of antiarrhythmic drugs.

Toddler saved

The Associated Press
VANCOUVER, Wash. —
Clark County firefighters say a 4-year-old girl nearly drowned at a popular swimming beach at Vancouver.

Fire District 6 says a bystander spotted the girl face down in the water Monday evening at Klineline Pond in Salmon Creek Park.

Witnesses started CPR until medics arrived.

The girl was airlifted to Legacy Emmanuel Medical Center in Portland in critical condition but later upgraded to serious condition.

We should all be ashamed that this sort of thing is still news, not the norm.

AMERICAN FALLS, Idaho — Quick-thinking coaches and a school's new defibrillator helped save the life of an American Falls High School athlete after the boy collapsed at practice.

Superintendent Ron Bolinger said 17-year-old Ross Palmer, a star on the football team, collapsed near the end of practice Tuesday night. The coaching staff couldn't find a pulse and started CPR.

Bolinger said another coach ran inside to get a defibrillator that the school had recently acquired. The second shock from the machine to the young athlete's heart started it beating again.

THERE IS NO REASONABLE EXCUSE FOR NOT HAVING AN AED AT EVERY ATHLETIC COMPETITION AND PRACTICE.

Bob

There's nothing like evidence to set the record straight.

The 2005 revisions to the BLS protocols stated that two minutes of CPR should precede defibrillation. A study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that there was no difference in outcomes between two large groups: (a) those that had 30-60 seconds of CPR before defibrillation and (b) those that had 180 seconds of CPR before defibrillation.

It will be interesting to see the letters to the editor published in subsequent issues.

The disappointing aspect of the study is that it showed a 5.9% survival rate, where survival means discharge from the hospital in a condition that permits the victim to perform the acts of daily living - i.e., with minor neurological deficits.

This does not mean that it doesn't matter how soon you defibrillate doesn't matter. Other studies have shown that defibrillating early helps. It does mean that during the 1-3 minute time-frame it doesn't make a lot of difference.

For the sake of your family & friends, get trained in CPR soon. For your sake, get your family & friends to get trained.

Bob

Ordinary people can save lives.

Seriously, folks. Ordinary people can keep a cardiac arrest victim's heart and brain alive long enough for a defibrillator to re-start the heart. It doesn't happen all the time, but why is it that 27 % of cardiac arrest survivors had their arrest in an airport? It's because there are lots of AED's and lots of trained people in airports. Why is it that 66 % of all cardiac arrests occur in the home, yet only 15% of the survivors had their arrest in the home? There aren't very many AED's in the home.

The only complaint I have with what happened in the save below is that there is no valid reason I can imagine why there shouldn't be an AED on the sidelines at any athletic competition or practice. You shouldn't have to run into the school to get the AED.

Here's the story.

BY PATTY HENETZ
The Salt Lake Tribune

First published Sep 02 2011 03:20PM
Updated Sep 3, 2011 07:39AM

If not for his coaches’ quick action, 17-year-old Ross Palmer would be dead.

The American Falls, Idaho, football player collapsed Tuesday evening while running wind sprints. Two of his coaches started cardiopulmonary resuscitation while another ran into the high school to grab the school’s new AED, a portable heart defibrillator.

Emergency technicians on their way told the coaches to hold off on shocking Ross’ heart, but they went ahead. And that, says Intermountain Medical Center cardiac surgeon Brian Crandall, was what kept Ross from becoming a statistic.

"Sudden death in athletes is quite common in the United States," Crandall said Friday. An estimated 1,000 die each year of unknown heart defects. "If [Ross] had not been shocked," Crandall said, "no way would he have come out of that."

On Friday, a team led by cardiac surgeon Peter Weiss placed a pager-size stimulator device in Ross’ chest, just below his left collarbone, then threaded a sensor wire through his arm’s subclavian vein into his heart.

The device won’t fix the young athlete’s heart, but it will protect him. From now on, if Ross’ heart goes into ventricle fibrillation arrest — quivering instead of beating — the implantable cardiac defibrillator, or ICD, will shock his heart back into action.

"Every doctor, every EMT I talked to said, ‘Your son should be dead,’ " said Travis Palmer, Ross’ father, who with other family members waited at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray during the 11/2-hour implant procedure.

"I’m glad he’s here," said Diana Palmer, Ross’ mother

Hey, parents. You can stop this!

Here's the results of a study recently reported by the CDC. What it suggests is that adolescents are dying / becoming disabled at an increasing rate because of hypertension and diabetes. Guess where the increased type 2 diabetes comes from. Send an angry letter to your favorite fast food store.

My view is that parents have a responsibility to take a strong stand when their children engage in unhealthy behaviors.

Yes, this is a blog about Practical CPR and treatment of sudden cardiac arrests, but the sorts of behaviors that cause the increase in strokes in young people are the same sort of behaviors that cause heart attacks and sudden cardiac arrests in young people, so this study is just one more reason for parents to control the factors that lead to Sudden Cardiac Arrests.

Here's the synopsis of the study:
______________

A new study indicates that the stroke risk among young people, children and adolescences in the U.S., is increasing. Previously, strokes appeared to be more common among older people.

According to researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the study, they examined hospital data for about eight million patients per year between 1995 and 2008. Between 1995 and 2008, the number of hospitalizations for strokes increased by 37 percent for people between 15 years old and 44 years old.

More specifically, one in three ischemic stroke patients were between 15 years old and 34 years old, and over half of those people between 35 years old and 44 years old had high blood pressure. Additionally, a fourth of the patients between 15 years old and 34 years old who experienced an ischemic stroke also had diabetes.

When comparing the stroke rate of ischemic stroke, due to blood clots, and hemorrhagic stroke, due to brain bleeding, hemorrhagic stroke rates decreased for all age groups, except for patients between five years old and 14 years old. Yet, the increase in the ischemic stroke rate exceeds the hemorrhagic stroke rate decrease. The rate of ischemic stroke increased by 31 percent in patients between five years old and 14 years old, from 3.2 strokes per 10,000 hospital cases to 4.2 per 10,000.

Interestingly, the stroke risk appears to be higher in men than in women.

The study also found a higher prevalence of hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and tobacco use among this population group for the 14-year study period. This study conclusion suggests that public health initiatives are needed to reduce the prevalence of risk factors for stroke among younger people.

According to the American Heart Association, stroke is the third leading cause of death in the U.S. and 87 percent of all cases are attributed to ischemic stroke. Ischemic stroke occurs when blood flow to the brain is blocked by blood clots or build-up of fatty deposits called plaque inside blood vessels.