Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Study Finds Fault With Kids' Chest Protectors

Chest gear does not always protect young athletes from dying when hit in the heart by a ball, a hockey puck or another player, according to a study that found 33 such deaths in the past decade among children wearing chest protection.

The deaths stem from an alignment of timing, location of the blow and perhaps the amount of muscle in the child's chest, Barry J. Maron, director of the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Center, said yesterday at the American Heart Association's annual meeting in Chicago.

The result is ventricular fibrillation, when the heart's electrical activity becomes out of sync, making it quiver rather than pump efficiently.

The fatal accidents were most common during baseball, softball and hockey games, affecting kids ages 13 to 15, on average, Maron said. The speed of the hit does not seem to be a factor, the study found.

None of the chest protectors widely available on the Internet or through sporting goods stores have been proved to absorb the energy from a blow to the heart, Maron said. In some cases, they may promote its spread, he said.

Hospitals can greatly improve their odds of saving heart attack patients by implementing half a dozen timesaving measures in their emergency rooms, a study has found.

Fewer than one-third of such patients now have their blocked arteries reopened within 90 minutes of arrival, as long-standing guidelines recommend. The risk of dying increases 42 percent if care is delayed even half an hour longer, according to a study posted yesterday on the New England Journal of Medicine's Web site.

Each of the new measures, which can be put in place quickly and inexpensively, can shave 8 to 20 minutes off treatment times, researchers said.

About a third of the 865,000 heart attacks in the United States each year and 10 million worldwide are considered major. They are caused by a total or near-total blockage of a major artery that prevents enough oxygen from reaching the heart tissue.

The risk of complications such as bleeding and infection in patients who have their stomachs surgically reduced varies drastically depending on which hospital performs the procedure, a study has found.

The study of 86,520 procedures, released yesterday, found that patients undergoing bariatric surgery at a highly rated hospital are 66 percent less likely to experience a complication, such as bleeding, pneumonia or heart problems, than at a poorly rated hospital.

The number of bariatric surgeries has quadrupled since 2000, reaching 171,000 in 2005, according to the American Society of Bariatric Surgery.

The study, conducted by the rating company Health Grades, looked at discharge records from 17 states from 2002 to 2004. It found that hospitals performing more procedures were more likely to have fewer complications.

Many of the world's forests appear to be making a comeback, and some countries are more thickly forested now than they were nearly 200 years ago, a study reported yesterday.

The United States and China had the greatest gain in forests over the past 15 years, while Brazil and Indonesia lost the most, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An international team of researchers found that the number of large trees increased from 1990 to 2005 in 22 of the 50 countries with the most forest.

-- From News Services