By ANISH KOKA

The year was 1965, the place was Boston Children’s and a surgery resident named Robert Bartlett took his turn at the bedside of a just born baby unable to breathe.  This particular baby couldn’t breathe because of a hole in the diaphragm that had allowed the intestines to travel up into the thoracic cage, and prevent normal development of the lungs.  In 1965, Robert Bartlett was engaged in the cutting edge treatment of the time – squeeze a bag that forced oxygenated air into tiny lungs and hope there was enough functioning lung tissue to participate in gas exchange to allow the body to get the oxygen it needed.  Bartlett persisted in ‘bagging’ the child for 2 days.  As was frequently the case, the treatments proved futile and the baby died.

The strange part of the syndrome that had come to be known as congenital diaphragmatic hernia was that repairing the defect and putting the intestines back where they belonged was not necessarily curative.  The clues to what was happening lay in autopsy studies that demonstrated arrested maturation of lung tissue in both compressed and uncompressed lung.  Some systemic process beyond simple compression of one lung must be operative.  It turns out that these little babies were blue because their bodies were shunting blood away from the immature lungs through vascular connections that normally close off after birth.  Add abnormally high pressures in the lungs and you have a perfect physiologic storm that was not compatible with life.

Pondering the problem, Bartlett wondered if there was a way to artificially do what the lungs were supposed to do – oxygenate.  Twelve years later in 1977, while most pediatric intensive care units were still figuring out how to ventilate babies, a team lead by Bartlett was using jerry rigged chest tube catheters to bypass the lungs of babies failing the standard treatments of the day.  In a series of reports that followed, Bartlett described the technique his team used in babies that heretofore had a mortality rate of 90%.  A home made catheter was placed in the internal jugular vein and pumped across an artificial membrane that oxygenated blood before it was returned via a catheter to the carotid artery.  The usual hiccups ensued.  The animal models didn’t adequately model the challenges of placing babies on what has come to be known as ECMO (Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation).

Patient 1 developed a severely low platelet count, hemorrhaged into the brain and died. Patient 2 survived but was on a ventilator for 7 weeks.  Patient 3 developed progressive pulmonary hypertension and died.  Patient 4 died because of misplacement of one of the ECMO catheters.

The team improved, and mortality in this moribund population improved to 20%.  The pediatric journals of the day refused to publish the data because they felt ECMO for neonates was irresponsible.  Once published, the neonatology community came out in force against ECMO, and some penned editorials implying the children only became supremely ill because Bartlett’s team was incompetent.  The team persisted, as is anyone that is driven by the desperate need of patients.  None of this should be surprising.  The constant battle between skeptics and proponents is a recurring theme known to anyone with even a limited understanding of  medical history.  But this is where the story goes off the rails.Continue reading…

By ANISH KOKA

The phone rings.  It’s not supposed to be ringing.  It’s 2 am.   The voice on the other line is from an apologetic surgery resident.

Resident: There is this patient..

Me: Yes, go ahead. Please.

Resident: He’s tachycardic.

Me: How fast?

Resident: 160 ?

Me: What’s the blood pressure?

Resident: 130/90

Me: Rhythm?

Resident: An SVT I think.. I gave adenosine.  Nothing happened

Me: Audibly groaning.  I’ll be in..

Forty five minutes later I’m at the bedside of a decidedly ill appearing man.

I want to be triumphant that his heart rate is only 145, and a quick glance at the telemetry monitor above his bed uncovers juicy p waves in a cadence that suggests this is no primary electrical arrhythmia.

Something is very wrong somewhere – the heart in this case is an innocent bystander being whipped into a frenzy to compensate for something.

At the moment the whip is a norepinephrine infusion being used to keep his blood pressure up.

I ask the nurse if the amount of norepinephrine infusing has been stable.  She replies that his dose has been slowly escalating.

Eureka! I think – the heart rate response in this case is being driven by the norepinephrine – a powerful adrenaline that acts on beta receptors and alpha receptors within the body that increase heart rate and constrict the blood vessels to raise blood pressure.  Fix the cause of the low blood pressure, come down on the norepinephrine, and perhaps the heart rate would be better.

But it turns out this particular post surgical patient doesn’t have a medical cause of low blood pressure I can find.  I cycle through cardiac ultrasounds, blood gases, steroid and volume challenges, and try inching down on the norepinephrine.

All of it is to no avail.  I’m growing more and more convinced this problem is surgical in nature. Perhaps an infarcted piece of bowel?  All I know is that the man acts like he has no peripheral vascular tone.

An interesting thing happens shortly after.  The norepinephrine drip runs out.

As one nurse runs to get another bag from the pharmacy – a quick cascade of events unfolds.

The brisk upstroke from the arterial line that marks the pressure wave generated with every beat of the heart starts to dampen.  The color seems to visibly drain from the patients face, and he begins to complain that his vision is getting blurry.  His systolic blood pressure is 70 – an almost forty point drop within a minute of the norepinephrine running out.

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By SOFIJA DRECUN

At this years’ SXSW it was all about blockchain and cryptocurrencies, but it was like that at HIMSS, JPM, CES, etc. as well. Since we wrote already about the first of the two buzzwords – blockchain as a trend in Healthcare, we decided to tackle the idea of cryptocurrencies in healthcare. First, we checked around the office and found out that several devs have been in a couple of Telegram chat rooms as they tried to buy “health coins” in a presale (ICO – initial Coin Offering; Pre-ICO).

Will you be buying your next health plan with ethereum? Or is the new health coin going to solve the problem of fragmented healthcare records?

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