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FRIDAY, May 1, 2020 (HealthDay News) – Many people who are seriously ill with COVID-19 wind up on ventilators to help them breathe, but sometimes even ventilators are not enough. This is when a device called ECMO can help.
ECMO can do the work of the lungs and, in some cases, the heart. ECMO stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. It is a machine that oxygenates the blood using a complex circuit of pumps, tubes, filters and monitors. Someone at ECMO needs to be monitored by a team of experts, and is not available in all hospitals.
“ECMO does nothing to treat COVID-19, but gives it time to replace lung function to allow for lung recovery,” explained Dr. Jonathan Haft, director of the ECMO program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor .
Dr. John Puskas, president of cardiovascular surgery at Mount Sinai Morningside in New York City, said ECMO is typically used when “patients reach a point where the ventilator is not enough.”
He said ECMO has a “sleek membrane that can exchange gases. It removes carbon dioxide and adds oxygen to the blood, basically replacing the lungs. ECMO is remarkably effective at adding oxygen to the blood.” And oxygen is just what many COVID-19 patients desperately need.
Currently, the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO) reports that more than 400 people are on ECMO for COVID-19 in North America. Haft said that membership in ELSO is voluntary and believes that the database can only account for about half of ECMO use in the United States.
However, one drawback is that ECMO is not as available as fans. It is also much more laborious to operate than fans.
Still, the World Health Organization has suggested that medical centers capable of providing ECMO should consider it in COVID-19 patients with very low oxygen levels despite other treatments, according to a view recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
But the authors of the point of view pointed out that “ECMO is not a therapy to be brought to the front line when all resources are depleted in a pandemic.”
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