Drones could aid heart emergencies
Equipped with defibrillators
CHICAGO, June 13, (AP): It sounds futuristic: drones carrying heart defibrillators swooping in to help bystanders revive people stricken by cardiac arrest.
Researchers tested the idea and found drones arrived at the scene of 18 cardiac arrests within about 5 minutes of launch. That was almost 17 minutes faster on average than ambulances — a big deal for a condition where minutes mean life or death.
Drone-delivered devices weren’t used on patients in the preliminary study, but the results are “pretty remarkable” and proof that the idea is worth exploring, said Dr Clyde Yancy, a former American Heart Association president who was not involved in the study.
Cardiac arrest is a leading cause of death worldwide, killing more than 6 million people each year. Most happen at home or in other nonmedical settings and most patients don’t survive.
“Ninety percent of people who collapse outside of a hospital don’t make it. This is a crisis and it’s time we do something different to address it,” said Yancy, cardiology chief at Northwestern University’s medical school in Chicago.
The researchers reached the same conclusion after analyzing cardiac arrest data in Sweden, focusing on
central Pacific, developing this year has been downgraded by US government forecasters as sea surface temperatures and wind speeds in the area remain close to their long-term averages. towns near Stockholm that don’t have enough emergency medical resources to serve summer vacationers.
The analysis found an emergency response time of almost 30 minutes and a survival rate of zero, said lead author Andreas Claesson, a researcher at the Center for Resuscitation Science at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
To see if care could be improved, Claesson’s team turned to drones.
Tested
Drones are increasingly being tested or used in a variety of settings, including to deliver retail goods to consumers in remote areas, search for lost hikers and help police monitor traffic or crowds. Using them to speed medical care seemed like a logical next step, Claesson said.
The study was done last October and was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
More than 350,000 Americans had a cardiac arrest in a nonmedical setting last year, the American Heart Association says. The condition is often confused with heart attacks but they’re different.
Heart attacks occur when a clot or other blockage stops blood flow to the heart. Cardiac arrest occurs
The Pacific saw a relatively rapid swing in late October from La Nina conditions - characterised as unusually cold temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean - to neutral or even slightly El Nino-leaning when electrical impulses controlling the heart’s rhythmic pumping action suddenly malfunction.
The heartbeat becomes very irregular or stops, preventing blood from reaching vital organs. Death can occur within minutes without treatment to restore a normal heartbeat, ideally CPR and use of a defibrillator.
The researchers used a small heart defibrillator weighing less than two pounds, featuring an electronic voice that gives instructions on how to use the device. It was attached to a small drone equipped with four small propeller-like rotors, a global positioning device and camera.
They launched the drone from a fire station within about 6 miles (10 kilometers) from homes where people had previous cardiac arrests.
In the study’s video footage simulating a rescue, a drone soars over residential rooftops and then lands gently in a backyard. A man dashes out of the house, grabs the defibrillator and carries it inside.
There were no crashes or other mishaps during the study, Claesson said. He plans a follow-up study to test drone-delivered defibrillators for bystanders to use in real-life cardiac arrests.
The test results show “a great potential for saving lives,” he said.
conditions by March.
Since then, however, the oceanic and atmospheric signals pointing to a possible El Nino have all weakened.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under its acting adinistrator Benjamin Friedman last week downgraded the probability of El Nino conditions being present in the fourth quarter of 2017, to just 36 percent. That is down from 53 percent at the time of its March forecast. The agency’s central prediction is now that conditions will be neutral in the fourth quarter, with a probability of 53 percent, with only an outlying chance of La Nina, at 11 percent.
El Nino has a major impact on temperatures and precipitation on countries bordering the Pacific and Indian oceans, and across Latin America, with a smaller impact in some areas of the United States.
The phenomenon is typically strongest during the northern hemisphere autumn and winter and weakest during early spring.
In winter, El Nino typically brings warmer weather to the US Northwest and cooler, wetter weather to the Southwest and Southeast states.
For the purposes of forecasting, meteorologists analyse the surface temperature of the Pacific in a series of boxes stretching from the coast of Peru west along the equator to the international date line and beyond. (RTRS)