Covid patients pushed medical extremes in life support breakthrough | Hacker News Reader

Covid patients pushed medical extremes in life support breakthrough

heraldsun.com.au

96 pointstomhoward68 comments

Every time I read about ECMO, the stories are saturated with weird comments by doctors and hospital officials about its “proper use”, whether they are doing the right thing to use it, etc. Explicitly they say the concern is for the patient (whether the potential suffering is worth it given the high chance of death), but I can’t square this with the numbers and with other medical practices. Unless there is some extreme physical torture associated with EMCO that’s not mentioned, being on EMCO for a week or month or 6 months seems obviously worth it for a 50% chance of survival from the patient’s perspective. Other patients with different illnesses routinely spend giant amounts of time in the ICU with much slimmer odds. Nothing I read in these articles suggests to me that ECMO stands out unusually above the high background levels of suffering in a modern hospital.

I suspect the underlying cause of the handwringing is the immense cost of ECMO (hundreds of thousands of dollars) and the distinct possibility that a patient ends up dependent on it (marginal cost >$5k per day) with no obvious ethical threshold for withdrawing care, at least according to the official prevailing norm that mere cost cannot be a reason to do so. This article is substantially more direct about that:

https://khn.org/news/miracle-machine-makes-heroic-rescues-an...

Very interested to hear commentary from people who know more though.

Cost isn't the only consideration; staffing is also important. ECMO is extremely high-touch (1:1 nursing recommended, and some patients may need 2:1), even compared to other ICU procedures; given a primary concern during the pandemic was running out of ICU capacity, a bunch of patients on ECMO can cause you to get to that point much more rapidly.

Staffing is a component of the cost.

It’s also an absolute availability issue. A hospital has, in the near to intermediate time horizon, the staff that it has. So dedicating staff in such ratios make them unavailable to other patients, so triage considerations come into play.

Staffing and cost are related, but there are staffing requirements that no amount of money thrown at them can fix.

Nurses are not an infinitely fungible commodity.

No, but a significant cause of current staffing shortages are stagnant wages (especially for non-travel nursing roles).

Hospitals paying decent wages to full-time/permanent staff would go a long way towards solving staffing shortages.

not trying to play doctor here, but a quick skim through the wikipedia article shows a high risk for developing neurological issues, infection, and blood related ailments

I imagine, and I hope someone with more knowledge can add on or correct me, that medicinal professionals are generally reluctant to use ECMO for extended periods due to the aforementioned issues. I personally know if my odds of waking up brain dead from a procedure were 50-50%, I wouldn't take that risk. so I wonder if doctors in this case saw a corresponding decrease in such risks?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygen...

I'm not a doctor either, but doesn't chemo have similarly high risks of serious side effects? When the odds of death are close to 100% otherwise, a treatment that improves those odds to 50% doesn't sound so bad.

This is a serious decision, not just between 100% death and 50%, but a significantly worse death for the other half of people than the original certain one.

Take the final period of a person’s life from them and their family for a devastating treatment that doesn’t help and then see how simple of a choice it feels.

My understanding is that hesitation to employ ECMO isn't about the risk of failure.

It's not like chemo or dialysis where you can live some kind of meaningful life while the treatment has an X% chance of buying you Y years.

It's extremely labor intensive. Another commenter mentioned 1:1 fulltime nurse care. If true, that means multiple fulltime employees, working in shifts, per ECMO patient. Given finite medical resources (doctors, nurses, beds, ECMO machines) we would like to make sure we're employing this only for patients who have a hope of recovering afterward.

In that sense it is similar to other "extreme measures" like ventilators and so on. We can sometimes keep somebody alive in a totally nonviable state for an extended amount of time after heart and/or lung failure, but if there's zero chance for recovery it just doesn't make sense from an ethical or practical standpoint.

(edit - when I say "we" I mean society. not "we" as in "we medical professionals." I am not a medical professional!)

> We can sometimes keep somebody alive in a totally nonviable state for an extended amount of time after heart and/or lung failure, but if there's zero chance for recovery it just doesn't make sense from an ethical or practical standpoint.

There are people on ECMO who have permanent heat and/or lung failure but are conscious, comfortable, and do not wish to have care withdrawn. In this case, it can absolutely make sense to continue to support them even if they have no hope of getting off the machine. The non-trivial ethical question is what to do if the cost is extremely high.

> Given finite medical resources (doctors, nurses, beds, ECMO machines) we would like to make sure we're employing this only for patients who have a hope of recovering afterward.

Outside the short-term, we can always hire more nurses and docs, and build more machines and hospital rooms. We should not pretend that the amount of these are fixed in order to justify withdrawing expensive but beneficial care (other than in emergency situations). If we are going to withdraw care because we just don't want to pay for it given the size of the benefits, we should acknowledge this explicitly.

I'd love to know more about this infinite pipeline of doctors and nurses you're referring to! Most coverage I've read lately has been about healthcare workers quitting in droves, so it's a relief to know that there are actually no limitations here.

   If we are going to withdraw care because we 
   just don't want to pay for it given the size 
   of the benefits, we should acknowledge this
   explicitly.

I feel like the discussion is super explicit about this?

For nearly all situations, I would agree that nobody should be suffering or dying because of a lack of willingness or ability to provide or pay for medical services.

But there are practical limits. There is a reason why we don't all get weekly mammograms, prostate exams, and dental checkups even though this would inarguably be the most effective way to catch things early.

> I'd love to know more about this infinite pipeline of doctors and nurses you're referring to! Most coverage I've read lately has been about healthcare workers quitting in droves, so it's a relief to know that there are actually no limitations here.

I clearly state in my comment that I was not talking about the short term. In the long term we just train more and pay more, it’s not rocket science. But if you are curious about how we could have a for-all-practical-purposes infinite pipeline in the short term, that is also easy: just recognize international medical degrees and give foreign doctors work visas.

> I feel like the discussion is super explicit about this?

I don’t think it is, although I agree that different people will interpret conversational norms differently. IMO, there is constant equivocation between medical rationing and medical triage. The mealy-mouth-ness is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted.

Like, why are we even talking about nurse shortages in this thread? If we were discussing whether it’s worth it to pay for an extra floor on our expensive houses, people wouldn't keep bringing up how we have to consider last year’s lumber shortage and how the US has too few skilled craftsmen because it doesn’t properly support trade schools (which is ofc true). We would just say “having another floor is nice, but it’s not worth an extra $100k”.

death and serious brain damage are not the same risk

> I personally know if my odds of waking up brain dead from a procedure were 50-50%, I wouldn't take that risk.

You would accept guaranteed death to avoid a 50% chance of brain death? That’s not necessarily an inconsistent preference, but it’s a highly unusual one.

Did you consider the impact on those responsible for your long term care?

Brain dead is dead. [1] There is no long term care. They turn off the machines pumping air in your chest and that's it.

I think you are confusing brain death with vegetative state caused by severe brain damage.

1: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/brain-death/

The poster's point would've made more sense, I think, if they'd used "significant cognitive impairment" instead of brain death.

Being left in a permanent state where I'd be conscious enough to want to die, but not be able to legally access that option, is a scary thought. I'd rather not live in a nursing home bed for fifty years.

Fortunately for your case, once people are bedridden, they very rarely survive fifty years.

Our bodies don't work very well when they can't keep moving.

ECMO is high risk for the patient, especially venoarterial (VA) ECMO which is probably not what is being described in this article. Venovenous (VV) ECMO doesn't dump blood into the arterial tree, so your risk of stroke or other arterial thrombotic complications is much lower. You still risk infection and venous clotting (and therefore the risks of iatrogenic anticoagulation), but I think most of us would accept those risks.

From a systems standpoint, the use of mechanical support usually makes sense in the context of being a bridge to somewhere that is not in-hospital, even in the event of non-recovery. At least where I practice, we want to be able to offer a durable device, or transplantation, if you don't recover. If you live in a place where the health system would not offer transplantation (e.g., because of some risk factor like advanced age), then offering ECMO makes less sense because it is not a bridge to anywhere, particularly for VA ECMO.

For VV ECMO, I think there has long been a recognition that people can do OK for an extended period of time (in contrast to VA ECMO, where the risks are higher and there are also destination therapies like ventricular assist devices). And if you're waiting for a lung transplant vs recovery, you may be waiting for quite awhile. To this end, there are special catheters for VV ECMO that facilitate mobility so you can retain some degree of strength and mobility while on ECMO (e.g., https://www.getinge.com/int/product-catalog/avalon-elite-bi-... ).

I'm closer to VA ECMO than to VV ECMO (but do neither); still, your comments ring more true for me about VV ECMO (which again I think is the subject of this article), whereas I think that patient risk + superior bridging/destination strategies really do dominate the VA ECMO discussion.

Thank you for this reply. Highly informative.

> whereas I think that patient risk + superior bridging/destination strategies really do dominate the VA ECMO discussion.

Is the idea here that when doctors are considering VA ECMO for a patient there is usually some non-trivial chance that the patient survives without it? In that case the choice, I guess, is between higher survival with more complications (VV ECMO) and lower survival with fewer complications (no ECMO)?

Sort of a facile response but we'll at least consider VA ECMO if we think the benefits outweigh the risks. E.g., a person in worsening cardiogenic shock because of a usually reversible insult (e.g., severe stress cardiomyopathy, or a refractory ventricular arrhythmia) has a very good chance of surviving the acute hospitalization but if I'm worried they will die tonight (even if they'd be fine 2 days from now after some recovery time) then will discuss VA ECMO with the people who actually do it for a living. VA ECMO's complications are a consideration in that calculus. That's the kind of decision where I think an observer could argue (especially if things go well) that there was a non-trivial chance that the patient would have survived without ECMO.

One important distinction is to understand that VA ECMO is more often used as mechanical circulatory support in cases of severe heart failure leading to cardiogenic shock. Used alone or in conjunction with other mechanical devices (balloon pumps or impella pumps) it can augment cardiac output to provide sufficient perfusion and oxygenation of your organs and distal extremities.

VV ECMO, on the other hand, is used purely for gas exchange (O2 and CO2) due to respiratory failure. Much of the debate in the critical care community is centered around which circumstances and patients derive the most benefit from initiation of VV ECMO. The best studied use case, is in the setting of acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is defined by very specific criteria (bilateral noncardiogenic pulmonary edema with ratio of arterial oxygenation partial pressure to fraction of inspired oxygen less than 300 mmHg). The EOLIA trial published in NEJM in 2018 looked at early initiation of VV ECMO in patients with severe ARDS [1]. It demonstrated no mortality benefit of ECMO, however many say that the study was not appropriately powered as the assumptions used to design the study were from 2008 when mortality from ARDS was much higher. Re-analysis of the data from the EOLIA trial using bayesian methods suggests that there might actually some benefit to early initiation of ECMO [2]

1. https://www.wikijournalclub.org/wiki/EOLIA

2. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2709620

The negative side effects are not to be taken lightly, especially if they cause profound suffering prior to a patient’s death or severe lifelong morbidity for a survivor. Yes, there are amazing uses of the technology, but the doctors who refer to proper use are speaking from a place of having seen the improper use.

Some countries do not perform hemicorporectomy, since they think survival would not be worth it.

Outside of the other comments here, I would also suggest considering the expected outcomes rather than just whether or not someone will live and die. For example, if someone spends a month on ECMO and the end result is that they're neurologically devastated, require a feeding tube, tracheostomy, and get discharged to an LTAC, was it worth it? If someone can never have a conversation again, or hold they're children, or read a book, was it worth it? If someone is likely to die, is it worth it to break their ribs or cover them in their own blood and fluid when they code? Given how sick someone is when they're put on ECMO, these are all realistic and likely outcomes.

And, look, this is a value choice that families have to make, but also one that most have not considered before getting sick and don't really want to consider when they're thrown into that situation. Physicians know about these likely outcomes, so it affects their opinion about its use.

As a brief aside, if anyone does end up in this situation, it's stressful and I'm sorry that you're going through this. Really. If I could offer one unsolicited suggestion, it would be to discuss the possible and likely outcomes with your physician, beyond life and death, so that you can make an informed decision that's best for your family.

Not to mention the costs.

Medical resources are limited, and in a country where we are chronically under treating people, it makes no sense to torture someone with an ECMO for a month, only for them to 'recover' to the state mentioned above.

That money/medical effort could have been used to save/significantly improve the lives of dozens of people, instead of prolonging the death of one.

It all comes out of an insurance pool, it's not like people are bearing ECMO costs out-of-pocket. It all comes out of the same labour pool, when you've got your entire medical staff put on hopeless cases, there are people who could be helped who are being denied treatment.

We are both chronically under treating some patients and over treating others. Over treatment is a leading cause of iatrogenic harm. Some providers default to aggressive treatment whether due to a sincere belief that it's best for the patient, or to satisfy patient requests, or to make more money. But evidence based medicine guidelines indicate that it's often best to do nothing beyond active monitoring of the patient's condition.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0181970

Ideally we should be allocating limited medical resources based on formulas that maximize overall benefit as quantified by quality-adjusted life years (QALY). But it's politically difficult to set rational policies around rationing care without triggering toxic disputes about "death panels" and "killing grandma".

To give some color. I haven't heard that marginal costs are ~$5000/day, I have heard they are closer to $20k/day. Granted other procedures were involved, but one ECMO stay was over $12M for 4 months. That is closer to $100k/day.

How many other people could you save (even within the same healthcare system) for that kind of money? These long tails have huge impacts on insurance costs.

Yep that's insane. That's the same as giving 1,000 families $1000 a month for the first year that their child is born. Surely that would have a significantly larger positive impact on society

> I haven't heard that marginal costs are ~$5000/day, I have heard they are closer to $20k/day.

To be clear, I wrote >$5k, not ~$5k.

No supporting data other than my decades working in healthcare and having conversations with coworkers versus my non healthcare working family/friends.

I’d say those in the medical community that have been more exposed to what that altered reality looks like, tend to not want it for themselves. That is to say, they’d rather expire. They’d probably also use that info to inform choices they made for loved ones in a similar situation.

The general population is very mixed but there seem to be more folks on relative basis that would keep someone alive at all costs or try anything to save them regardless of the risk. I also think sometimes it just comes down to medical professionals being able to come to grips with the reality of the situation and make a hard decision when others default choice is keep them alive /try anything.

Aside: I worked in a hospital from 18-25 and have basically seen it all as my job had me in every department caring for every patient and I notice when something crazy happens I still have the ability to not be consumed with shock but assist. I recently saw a pedestrian/auto accident and was on foot myself. About 30 folks around saw it happen. Everyone froze or turned away in disgust. I ran and basically took control of the situation until EMTs arrived. This has happened a few times in my life and I can’t help but to correlate it to my exposure to the hospital environment.

> Outside of the other comments here, I would also suggest considering the expected outcomes rather than just whether or not someone will live and die.

I take this to be obvious.

What do the survivors deal with though? I recently had an injury that required surgery and occupational therapy. My entire limb was a sad, useless appendage for months mostly due to immobility and how it reacted to pain. I can’t imagine the mountain one must surmount to get back to even 25% of their pre illness self. I was down to 15% use by the time my OT started. And 6 months later it still is a daily task to keep improving (much better now though).

It must take an incredible toll and on already sick body.

I think the right thing to do for the time being is to consider prolonged use of ECMO as a research practice where not everyone is accepted but those accepted taken care off as long as they are conscious or have a decent chance of regaining consciousness and making their own informed decision. Costs of doing so are part of research budget that determines how many patients can be included. Not providing care to everyone is ethical so long as we don't know if the care is going to help anyway.

In turn, research can determine - Exactly what kind of patients are most likely to recover after prolonged use of current ECMO machines - Potential ways to bring equipment and nursing costs down while preserving most of effectiveness. - Ways to wean the patient off intensive care long term.

For example, the very first genetically modified pig heart transplant resulted in 2 months conscious survival. Even if animal transplants never become a long term solution, they could prove more cost and medically effective than ECMOs to buy time for own organ recovery or a human transplant.

A lot of my infection control colleagues are rightly terrified of keeping people on ECMO or mechanical ventilation due to infection risk, that are extremely hard to treat.

This was especially acute during the early phase of the pandemic, when the combination of the intensity of care COVID patients required + the PPE shortage meant some compromises that they'd really prefer not to make.

As a counterpoint (anecdata...) to some comments here...

After contracting covid around Christmas and ~recovering over about 2 weeks, one of my younger sisters, 31 + pregnant, started feeling short of breath in late February. She went into the hospital, was held for observation/testing for a little over a day but was in good spirits.

Healthy. No major preexisting conditions before covid (aside from pregnancy and some allergies). No ~ground-glass anomaly (as I understand it).

She went into acute respiratory distress in the wee hours of the morning. Intubation helped get oxygen in, but C02 was building in her blood. Within 4 hours, they made the call to put her on ECMO. They needed to wheel her to another wing of the hospital and told her husband she might not even last that long. The chaplain followed them over.

Once there, they sprayed the walls and bed with her blood, and made her a cyborg for a week. And then we got her back.

(Well. Kinda. She was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia during this episode, and is having to live in the hospital until she delivers.)

She is, demographically, the kind of patient that merits interventions like this. As the news filtered to me several hundred miles away in spurts and haunting silences, I started my grieving when I heard she'd been intubated. ECMO was the only light in the tunnel.

(* I write this as a selfish brother with zero knowledge of the long term financial consequences to my sister and her young family.)

Best of luck to her and family. My heart goes out to you all.

Wow, that was hard to read. Was she vaccinated against Covid?

Out of curiosity, of what will the answer inform you?

If she was vaccinated, then COVID sounds like it could still be a big problem.

If not, then the current general impression of COVID largely being behind us (us being the vaccinated world) is still tenable.

Respiratory distress is a symptom of preeclampsia. Doesn't have to be related to COVID.

As I understand it, she wasn't diagnosed with preeclampsia (despite being a pregnant woman in a maternity hospital for shortness of breath--for ~36h) until after she was placed on ECMO. Her levels (I think maybe liver enzyme is what matters?) fell back into normal range within a few days of coming off ECMO, but they do not reverse the diagnosis once given.

“Vaccinated” is not really a Boolean. It is a list of N vaccine types and administration dates. After all, the protection fades over time, subject to many variables.

Relevance? The question still has a boolean answer (modulo booster), regardless of the menu of vaccine options.

Causality is never clear in individual cases. With millions of cases worldwide there will always be occasional outliers due to genetics or environmental factors or random luck. Severe COVID-19 symptoms have always been rare in that age group, and multiple large scale clinical trials have shown pretty conclusively that vaccination cuts the risk still further. But vaccines are never 100% effective, and individual anecdotes don't tell us anything useful about vaccine efficacy.

SARS-CoV-2 can never be eradicated and it will continue killing people just like other endemic respiratory viruses such as influenza, RSV, HCoV-OC43, etc. At this point the majority of Americans have already been infected so it's time to accept the risk and move on, regardless of how well the vaccines work.

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/26/1094817774/covid-19-infection...

She had an initial 2-shot course, but shied away from the booster after she found out she was pregnant (in late Oct, iirc.)

I'm really sorry that happened to your sister, but I'm also glad that's working out. Really, despite all of the pessimism about end-of-life decisions, ECMO is good technology and your sister's case is good evidence of that. I think what gets mixed up in all of this conversation is that what may be a good idea when you're less than 60 may not be a good idea when you're over 90.

As a side note, evidently, the French have really good medical technology and practice. They have been able to run ECMO in a Paris subway in order to save someone's life:

https://www.jems.com/patient-care/how-physicians-perform-pre...

I really do hope this kind of measure can be made more readily available. Till then, I'm still happy it works for people like your sister.

If you are bad enough to need ECMO, you may as well wish you were dead. Not sure what is better.

Little is talked about the life of these people after they are "saved", whatever that word means. Besides sequelae from Covid itself, you're getting ECMO sequelae as a cherry on top. You can't just go back to life as it was.

Not just ECMO, people who were "only" on a respirator for a few weeks/months also have their fair share of issues afterwards. Makes you think reading stories like these should be enough to convince anyone to get vaccinated. But some people are still convinced that this won't happen to them if they get Covid, however they fear any number of side effects from the vaccination...

Just go read the sister thread right now on myocarditis in Israel… people are calling for tribunals on medical malpractice for forcing people to get vaccines…

Can you link the thread please. I looked through your profiles other comments but I didn't see it.

I don't know if there is a discussion thread but an Israeli study was just published yesterday which found an association between COVID-19 vaccination and myocarditis in young men.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-10928-z

(I am not taking a position on the findings of that study, just providing a link as a reference.)

Not the person you're responding to, but if you're unaware/interested in relevant data this study [1] was just published 10 days ago and it's interesting. It compared the rates of myocarditis/pericarditis only within the 28 day period following vaccination to the rates experienced by unvaccinated individuals over a sample of 23 million Europeans.

Keep in mind the metric they use (IRR - incident rate ratio) is a ratio, not a percent. So an IRR of 15 means 1500% more events. Table 2 lays out everything quite nicely. To see it you need to click on figures/tables and scroll down a bit.

[1] - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...

Probably this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31202038

I suggest you use https://hn.algolia.com/ to search for past stories or comments (make sure to use the correct combo selections, otherwise it won’t give you what you want!).

Given that the risk of myocarditis after covid 19 infection is six times worse than after vaccination [1] this is just a cost of doing business.

(where "cost of doing business" is defined as "not dying from a disease which is easily preventable in the vast majority of cases")

[1] - https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25133462-800-myocardi...

> But some people are still convinced that this won't happen to them if they get Covid, however they fear any number of side effects from the vaccination...

Ayup. Had a close relative like this--he was about 10 years younger than me and still has a teenager. He got Delta and wound up on ECMO. He didn't make it.

All because anti-vax was part of his social identity.

And it's not like he didn't know. I got Covid Original Flavour(tm) and loudly told everybody around me how much it sucked (it was basically the 3rd sickest I've ever been in my life) and all the side effects I got from it.

My wife treats ECMO patients, and it is not uncommon for them to attempt suicide by pulling out the cannulas. A couple have succeeded. What follows is a rapid exsanguination over the next few minutes as the machine pumps their blood onto the floor at 2 L/min. That tells me the quality of life while on treatment is not good.

The ones that survive the treatment (less than half) are never the same. But they aren't dead.

I'd be cautious assuming intensive care patients are entirely of right mind. Something in ICU treatment tends to induce delirium/psychosis.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/publications/hopkins_me...

> The sickest of survivors frequently experience delirium at some point in their course of treatment. The condition occurs in 70 to 80 percent of acute respiratory failure cases, according to a 2013 study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Among the elderly the ICU delirium rate is similarly at about 80 percent, experts say.

Note I did not say everyone who pulls out their cannula is doing it intentionally. You are right that some do it accidentally, which is extremely sad.

> I did not say everyone who pulls out their cannula is doing it intentionally.

That's not my objection.

I'm saying the folks who do it intentionally may not always be of sound mind. It's not uncommon for folks coming out of anesthesia to panic and be distressed, especially if they're intubated.

Ok. But at what cost? Not financial cost per se, but along the lines of opportunity cost. These efforts, while very impressive, consume a significant (read: disproportionate) amount of resources. Resources that could possibly be deployed elsewhere.

I'm not suggesting it was foolish to do this. But there is broader context for "do no harm".

Side note: I get this

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You know I dont want your content herald.

Wow, that's pretty terrible. You can use archive links (https://archive.ph/idtyC) if you care enough but the way this website treats visitors made me lose interest in the story all together.

If I click the link om redirected to some subdomein that's blocked by my PiHole so that's also quite telling.

Completely unreadable for me due to three hovering ads, along three edges of the screen. Easily the worst experience I can remember seeing.

old Melbourne saying: "Is it the truth, or did you read it in the Herald Sun?"..

like any Murdoch rag it sometimes might put out a news article to keep up appearances, but there is usually a better source..

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