CO Poisoning: A Little Help Reading A Big Study

Thanks to the learned evaluation by Dr Leon Gussow in The Poison Review, we have a much firmer grasp of the large study (385 patients) published 2 December 2010 in Intensive Care Medicine, which casts doubt on the efficacy of hyperbaric oxygen for acute carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning. Gussow rates the paper well worth reading: 3.5 skulls-and-crossbones on a scale of 5. But he finds some potentially serious flaws in the study design. Most important, he concludes that the paper "...doesn’t really answer (or address) the key question: Does treating a CO-exposed patient who at any time lost consciousness with HBO improve long-term neurological outcome?" The rest of the TPR analysis explains why.

Meanwhile, in the news just this last week, HBOT proved instrumental in treating people overcome by carbon monoxide fumes in Hyattsville MD, Baltimore, suburban Dayton, Gunnison CO, and Sebring FL. The Florida incident occurred at a hyperbaric oxygen treatment center.

O2.0 is the news blog of HyperbaricLink, the independent web guide to hyperbaric oxygen therapy.