Giving rescue workers training to administer drugs and insert a tube down the throat of someone with life-threatening breathing problems can save lives, Canadian researchers reported on Wednesday.
The small but significant reduction in the risk of death is important because 2 million people with respiratory distress — often from asthma, pneumonia or congestive heart failure — are taken to U.S. hospitals each year.
Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers said the death rate went from 14.3 percent before intubation and drugs became available to rescue workers, to 12.4 percent after it was.
The difference was less than 2 percentage points, but that could translate into 20,000 lives saved each year in the U.S. and Canada, said the team led by Dr. Ian Stiell of the University of Ottawa.
The next step, Stiell said in a telephone interview, is to look at all the things the rescue workers were doing and “tease out which component makes the biggest difference in treatment.”
The benefits may have been due to the use of drugs like nebulized salbutamol, also known as albuterol, and nitroglycerin, the researchers said.
Rescue workers “can easily add medication for symptom relief. Those can be given by every ambulance attendant in the continent,” Stiell said.
“Respiratory distress is the second most common symptom of adults transported by ambulance and is associated with a relatively high overall mortality before hospital discharge of 18 percent,” his team wrote.
“Among the most common causes of respiratory distress in this setting are congestive heart failure, pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma.”