Thursday, August 10, 2006

FDA Clarifies Points from JAMA Article on AED Recalls

A worthwhile clarification by the FDA was published today regarding the JAMA article on automatic external defibrillator (AED) recalls recently published. Hopefully this will quell some of the hype regarding the authors' findings.

-Wes

1 comment:

DrWes said...

Michael-

I noticed your referring URL is from Romania. I have no idea what drug rehab article you are speaking about, or how this relates to AED's. I realize this is an ADVERTISEMENT, but I guess it makes a point, so I won't delete it (you're welcome).
Here's some REAL DATA from the AHA's website on out-of-hospital cardiac arrest:
• 330,000 coronary heart disease deaths occur out-of-hospital or in hospital emergency
departments annually (2002) (ICD-10 codes I20-I25: CDC/NCHS data for 2002.)
• The annual incidence of sudden cardiac arrest in North America is ~0.55 per 1,000 population. With an estimated US population of 296,766,821, this implies that about 163,221 out-of-hospital sudden cardiac arrests occur annually in the US. (ICD-10 codes I20-I25; Vaillancourt C, Stiell IG. Cardiac arrest care and emergency medical services in Canada. Can J Cardiol 2004;20:1081–90; Monthly Postcensal Resident Population (8/1/2005): U.S. Census data. http://www.census.gov/ accessed on Oct. 19, 2005; Myerburg RJ, Kessler KM, Castellanos A. Sudden cardiac death: epidemiology, transient risk, and intervention assessment. Ann Intern Med 1993; 15;119:1187-97.)


Dying of "heart disease" does not mean of dying of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (for which an AED might be helpful). Some people might not want to shell out big bucks for an AED for such a relatively uncommon occurrence.

Please, no more ads.