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WEDNESDAY, May 23 (HealthDay News) -- Training paramedics to better improve the breathing of people rushed to the hospital in respiratory distress saves lives, a Canadian study shows.
"It's estimated that of all the ambulance transports in North America, about 20 percent have shortness of breath caused by lots of different conditions," explained Dr. Ian G. Stiell, chair of the department of emergency medicine at the University of Ottawa. "In the United States, perhaps two million people a year are taken to the hospital for trouble breathing."
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Helping those people breathe by giving a drug, implanting a tube or another method reduced the death rate by 30 percent in the two-phase trial of more than 8,100 patients, which was reported in the May 25 New England Journal of Medicine.
In the first phase of the trial, paramedics riding ambulances were not trained in advanced respiratory life support and did not give advanced assistance to those with breathing difficulties. In the second phase, paramedics trained in advanced life support helped more than half the patients by such methods as implanting a breathing tube (1.4 percent of patients) or giving intravenous drugs (15 percent of patients).
"The rate of death among all patients decreased significantly, from 14.3 percent to 12.4 percent," the report said. That works out to a 30 percent increase in survival among those in the advanced care group versus those in the basic care cohort.
"When you consider how common such breathing difficulties are, giving this help could affect literally tens of thousands of lives each year," Stiell said.
It's not clear how widely emergency respiratory measures are used in ambulances, he said. While their advantages are known in general, "this is the first study that shows this kind of help makes a difference," Stiell said.
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