Magic words: "...CPR was performed and a defibrillator was used" It makes a huge difference!
Runner in downtown Duluth race revived after suffering cardiac arrest
Gene Curnow, 67, of Saginaw, a veteran racer and race organizer, suffered a cardiac arrest after finishing the All City Mile run Sunday.
By: News Tribune staff, Duluth News Tribune
Gene Curnow, 67, of Saginaw, a veteran racer and race organizer, suffered a cardiac arrest after finishing the All City Mile run Sunday.
He was attended to at the finish line by paramedics, race volunteers and a fellow runner, and was revived and taken to the cardiac intensive care unit at St. Luke’s hospital. He was being kept overnight for tests, said his wife, Barb.
Curnow has completed more than 200 marathons and ultramarathons (races longer than 26.2 miles) and has worked, with his wife, in putting on races in the area, including the Minnesota Voyageur Trail Ultramarathon 50-Miler in Carlton.
However, in three of the past four years he’s been slowed by Lyme disease, and there is a family history of heart disease, Barb Curnow said.
Gene Curnow finished Sunday’s mile race in 8 minutes, 16 seconds and was talking with runners afterward when he became lightheaded and fell to the ground. CPR was performed and a defibrillator was used, and he was alert when taken by ambulance to St. Luke’s. He had finished the 2011 Grandma’s Marathon in 5:28:05 on June 18.
When you see a cardiac arrest, your brain fights you - "No, this isn't really happening" - and the circumstances fight you - "Dang! in CPR class the manikin didn't weigh very much and wasn't sitting in a deep chair. This blog deals with practical details and presents reports of "saves." Let me have your questions and comments - they will steer the course of this blog. This blog is brought to you by the volunteers at www.slicc.org
Monday, September 12, 2011
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Another excuse bite the dust!
The Medical College of Wisconsin reviewed six dozen cases where Bystander CPR was performed on people who didn't need it.
Here's what Michael McGonigal MD, the Director of Trauma Services at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, MN had to say about the results.
Bottom line: The potential benefit of bystander CPR outweighs the risk of injury or performing it on a victim who is not in arrest. This study shows that, although these patients may not need CPR, they are generally very ill. Given the rapid EMS response times and the younger average age of the victims, no real injuries occurred. The new American Heart Association recommendations are beneficial and should be distributed widely.
For those wanting further detail, see
http://regionstraumapro.com/post/9993936879
Here's what Michael McGonigal MD, the Director of Trauma Services at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, MN had to say about the results.
Bottom line: The potential benefit of bystander CPR outweighs the risk of injury or performing it on a victim who is not in arrest. This study shows that, although these patients may not need CPR, they are generally very ill. Given the rapid EMS response times and the younger average age of the victims, no real injuries occurred. The new American Heart Association recommendations are beneficial and should be distributed widely.
For those wanting further detail, see
http://regionstraumapro.com/post/9993936879
Man drowns at high school pool
September 10, 2011 9:13 AM
KENTWOOD, Mich. (NEWSCHANNEL 3) – Emergency responders from Kent County responded to the East Kentwood High School pool Friday night after a man drowned.
Deputies say the 68-year-old man was swimming laps Friday night when another swimmer saw him floating in the pool.
Lifeguards pulled the man out of the water and began CPR.
Deputies believe a medical condition may be behind the drowning. The incident is under investigation.
__________________
Didn't see anything about an AED, did you?
Did anything else strike you as odd about this story?
KENTWOOD, Mich. (NEWSCHANNEL 3) – Emergency responders from Kent County responded to the East Kentwood High School pool Friday night after a man drowned.
Deputies say the 68-year-old man was swimming laps Friday night when another swimmer saw him floating in the pool.
Lifeguards pulled the man out of the water and began CPR.
Deputies believe a medical condition may be behind the drowning. The incident is under investigation.
__________________
Didn't see anything about an AED, did you?
Did anything else strike you as odd about this story?
Friday, September 9, 2011
Make a few phone calls and raise your blood pressure...
Do your schools have public access AEDs? ...AEDs that anyone can grab off the wall and use? And do your schools have AEDs positioned so that someone can fetch one and get to the victim & bystander rescuer in two minutes? And do your schools without fail have an AED at every athletic practice and contest?
Unfortunately, most schools don't. But maybe if enough of us call the schools and ask them, they'll start to think about it.
Unfortunately, most schools don't. But maybe if enough of us call the schools and ask them, they'll start to think about it.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
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
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.
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.
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.
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