AUSTIN, TEX. – Smokers offered home oxygen therapy were found to be at twice the risk for burn injuries, based on data from a retrospective study.
Even so, almost all the home oxygen therapy (HOT) burn victims were discharged with a prescription for oxygen, including the 15% of patients who had incurred similar injuries at least once, and in some cases, three times.
“I have a problem with this,” said Dr. Mary Baker, a critical care fellow at Indiana University and a medical ethics fellow at the university’s Richard M. Fairbanks Burn Center at Wishard-Eskenazi Health, both in Indianapolis. Dr. Baker presented the findings at the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians.
Whitney McKnight/Frontline Medical News
Dr. Mary Baker
“Should we be prescribing oxygen to patients who smoke? Maybe the bigger question is [whether] it is ever ethically defensible to take oxygen away once someone has sustained a combustion injury from smoking while using HOT,” she said.
Dr. Baker and her colleagues conducted a chart review of patients admitted to a single site for home oxygen–related burns between 2008 and 2013. They found that 55 of all such burn unit admissions were smokers, representing 4% of the center’s annual admissions rate and twice that of the national burn rate for smokers in general. Nearly all the patients, a balance of men and women with a median age of 61 years, were using HOT for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
“The location of the burns, probably not surprisingly, was the face. Probably the most common was the nasal cannula,” Dr. Baker said.