Last winter, the Penn Hyperbaric Medicine team noticed that they were uncommonly busy. That wouldn’t have been remarkable for most providers, since COVID-19 presented a significant challenge for health systems across the country. But hyperbaric medicine uses special chambers that manipulate pressure — reaching two or three times the pressure typically felt at sea level—to help restore oxygen to body tissues. Many know it for its use in treating underwater divers for decompression sickness, or “the bends.”
But for the land-based, hyperbaric medicine is an important treatment for forcing carbon monoxide gas out of the blood of the most severely poisoned patients. This treatment is especially important because it helps reduce potentially significant neurological conditions like seizures, or memory or motor function problems that present similarly to a concussion. Last winter, Penn’s Hyperbaric Medicine team was seeing abnormally high numbers of patients needing the treatment, which is typically only used for the worst cases.
“Typically, from 2016 through 2019, we averaged about 36 people in the hyperbaric chamber for carbon monoxide poisoning,” says Michael Tom, a doctor in emergency medicine on the Hyperbaric Medicine treatment team at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. “That number doubled in 2020, and we saw most during the winter of 2020-2021. Since we only treat a minority of carbon monoxide poisoning cases, the people with the highest levels of carbon monoxide in their system, we knew many more must have been coming into the emergency department with serious, but lower severities.”
So why was there such a spike in cases last year? Penn’s team has some theories, which actually have to do with the COVID-19 pandemic, to an extent.
“The usual causes are an old or malfunctioning heating system leaking carbon monoxide into a home,” Tom says. “We’d need data on this, but everyone’s speculation is that people were home more because of the pandemic, and with so many people out of work or with limited financial resources, they were not getting maintenance for their systems. So more systems were in danger of leaking the gas into homes.”
When they were able to secure 60 detectors, partly through a donation from the Jenkins Foundation, the Hyperbaric Medicine team decided to split them up. One group of 20 went to the People’s Emergency Center to be distributed to the families they work with who need transitional or permanent housing.
“In light of the recent tragedies in both Philadelphia and New York, we are going beyond our usual safety measures to ensure the families living in our housing have all of the tools necessary to ensure their safety,” says Kathy Desmond, executive director of the People’s Emergency Center. “These detectors are a critical piece of that.”
The remaining detectors will be handed out through the Hyperbaric Medicine team and in the emergency department at Penn to patients who come in with carbon monoxide poisoning but don’t have a detector in an effort to prevent future incidents.
This story is by Frank Otto. Read more at Penn Medicine News.
