When detailing some of the photos that have appeared in the media of patients admitted to hospital critical care units due to the covid-19, something is striking: many of them are upside down.
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The atypical posture is not accidental: there is evidence that in patients connected to ventilators, the prone position (lying on your stomach and with your head on your side) is more convenient for the lungs because helps prevent fluid from accumulating in the back of the lungs, relatively less affected, explains Daniel Brenner of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland to AFP.
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This is done for periods of 12, 16 or 24 hours to try to improve the oxygenation of the patients.
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The most significant complication of Covid-19 patients is Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), under which the lungs become hard and inflamed, and the patient suffers from a severe lack of oxygen. This is when it is necessary to use an artificial respirator.
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The technique of turning the person upside down is not new: it is frequently used in premature babies who must be connected to artificial respirators. However, when applied to adults, requires constant monitoring to prevent the respirator tube from shifting.
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It has begun to be applied in many hospitals around the world during the pandemic as an observational study done in a Wuhan clinic found benefits in a small group of critically ill patients in whom this technique was applied. “The lungs improved when the patient was in that position”said study author Chun Pan, a professor at the Zhongda Hospital Medical School.
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“By turning the patients around, we get this blood, due to gravity, to fall in the anterior part and that area is ventilated, allowing oxygen to be redistributed better and reaching those poorly ventilated areas,” explains the Spanish newspaper El Heraldo Pablo. Ruiz de Gopegui, intensivist doctor at the Miguel Servet University Hospital.
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