What To Do When You Need Quick Help With Kids" Injuries

One thing to do when a child is injured is call 911. The child can also be rushed to the nearest hospital if the adult believes that the child’s condition won’t deteriorate. The adult can also call the child’s pediatrician and ask what can be done. The adult will need to be calm and give as much detail as he or she can. This includes giving a number where the adult can be reached, the exact location of the accident, the type and gravity of the injury, the gender and age of the child and whether there are any hazards in the area like downed power lines or icy roads.

 

There are two things to do when dealing with an injured child even before an ambulance is called:

 

• The helper needs to find out what’s wrong with the child

 

• The helper then needs to treat the injuries according to their severity. A life threatening injury needs to be dealt with first. Three other things that need to be seen to are:

 

• Airway

 

The child’s airway needs to be cleared. If the child is talking to the person or crying, that means his or her airway is clear. If the child is unconscious, his or her tongue might have fallen back in his or her mouth and blocked the airway. The adult should open the airway by lifting the child’s chin and tilting back his or her head. This moves the tongue from the back of the throat and clears the airway.

 

• Breathing

The helper needs to see if the child is breathing normally. If the child isn’t breathing, the adult should start CPR.

 

• Circulation

The helper will need to see if the child is bleeding from the injury. If the bleeding is severe, it needs to be treated at once. Direct pressure should be applied to the wound with by a sterile dressing held by the helper. The injured limb should be raised above the level of the child’s heart and the child should be helped to lie down. The legs too should be raised above the heart to lessen the risk of shock.

 

Fractures need to be stabilized and secured by slings, bandages and padding.

 

Lost teeth aren’t as gruesome as they appear, and if the tooth is reimplanted within an hour of being knocked out, it can be saved. Place a knocked out tooth back in the socket or have the child hold the tooth in his or her cheek or under his or her tongue. If the tooth is filthy, it can be put in a cup of milk. A chipped tooth can be temporarily fixed with dental cement until the child sees the dentist.Dr. Eli Markovich DDS can help with any of these dental problems that your child may run into.

 

The helper should also note whether the child was conscious or not and then pay attention to any change in consciousness while they wait for help. Some injuries, like head injuries, can be very serious but hidden. The only sign of them is a change in the victim’s consciousness.

 

The helper should examine the child from head to toe to make sure that there are no injuries that have been missed. If the child is unconscious but breathing, he or she should be put in a recovery position. This is where the child is gently rolled on his or her side, one knee is drawn up and a hand placed under the cheek to keep the airway open.

Categories: Adult, airway, airway nbsp, Child, helper, injuries, Kids, nbsp, Quick

Researchers Develop Innovative Way to Study COPD

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have created a novel way to study COPD and could lead to new treatments and ways to monitor how those treatments affect patient wellness. This discovery has come as a result of a study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, in which the US researchers harvested airway cells using a minimally invasive procedure, helping them to identify a genetic signature for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

When your wellbeing is affected by COPD, this means that you can experience coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, chest tightness and other symptoms that make it difficult to breathe. The progressive lung disease leads to a loss of lung function, and is primarily caused by cigarette smoking. Treatments and lifestyle changes can help you cope with COPD, but as it stands there is not cure or effective therapy to reduce your rate of lung function decline.

Katrina Steiling, an assistant professor of medicine at BUSM who served as the study’s first author, explained, ‘There have been limited molecular studies of COPD given the inaccessibility and invasiveness of obtaining lung tissue.’ Therefore, the researchers worked on the hypothesis that COPD might be detectable in relatively accessible tissue throughout the respiratory tract, even though the disease primarily affects the tissue deep within your lungs.

The researchers obtained airway cells through a bronchoscopy, which is a procedure that involves putting a small camera into your airway through your nose or mouth, and using a cytology brush to gently scrape the sides of your airways to collect cells. 87 of the 238 samples collected from current and former smokers were from patients who had been diagnosed with mild to moderate COPD based on their lung function.

When the researchers compared the airway samples from the 87 COPD patients with the others, they found that 98 genes were expressed at different levels in those diagnosed with COPD. According to Avrum Spira, MD, Alexander Graham Bell professor of medicine, chief of the division of computational biomedicine at BUSM, a physician in the pulmonary, critical care and allergy department at Boston Medical Centre and one of the senior co-authors of the study, ‘Our data shows that there are consistent gene-expression changes that occur in both airway and lung tissue cells in individuals with COPD.’

She continued, ‘Studying COPD using the large airway opens up some really exciting new avenues of research that could also improve care for patients with COPD. While we are still at an early stage, I envision being able to examine airway cells from my patients with COPD to determine what is causing the disease and, from that information, recommend a more specific and effective treatment.’

Researchers Develop Innovative Way to Study COPD

Categories: airway, airway cells, COPD, critical care, lung, lung function, lung tissue, Measuring, Research, study copd