• Resuscitation · May 2022

    Hypothermia is associated with a low ETCO2 and low pH-stat PaCO2 in refractory cardiac arrest.

    • T Darocha, G Debaty, F X Ageron, P Podsiadło, A Hutin, H Hymczak, M Blancher, S Kosiński, K Mendrala, P N Carron, L Lamhaut, P Bouzat, and M Pasquier.
    • Department of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care, Medical University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland. Electronic address: tomekdarocha@wp.pl.
    • Resuscitation. 2022 May 1; 174: 83-90.

    AimsThe end-tidal carbon dioxide (ETCO2) is frequently measured in cardiac arrest (CA) patients, for management and for predicting survival. Our goal was to study the PaCO2 and ETCO2 in hypothermic cardiac arrest patients.MethodsWe included patients with refractory CA assessed for extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Hypothermic patients were identified from previously prospectively collected data from Poland, France and Switzerland. The non-hypothermic CA patients were identified from two French cohort studies. The primary parameters of interest were ETCO2 and PaCO2 at hospital admission. We analysed the data according to both alpha-stat and pH-stat strategies.ResultsWe included 131 CA patients (39 hypothermic and 92 non-hypothermic). Both ETCO2 (p < 0.001) and pH-stat PaCO2 (p < 0.001) were significantly lower in hypothermic compared to non-hypothermic patients, which was not the case for alpha-stat PaCO2 (p = 0.15). The median PaCO2-ETCO2 gradient was greater for hypothermic compared to non-hypothermic patients when using the alpha-stat method (46 mmHg vs 30 mmHg, p = 0.007), but not when using the pH-stat method (p = 0.10). Temperature was positively correlated with ETCO2 (p < 0.01) and pH-stat PaCO2 (p < 0.01) but not with alpha-stat PaCO2 (p = 0.5). The ETCO2 decreased by 0.5 mmHg and the pH-stat PaCO2 by 1.1 mmHg for every decrease of 1° C of the temperature. The proportion of survivors with an ETCO2 ≤ 10 mmHg at hospital admission was 45% (9/25) for hypothermic and 12% (2/17) for non-hypothermic CA patients.ConclusionsHypothermic CA is associated with a decrease of the ETCO2 and pH-stat PaCO2 compared with non-hypothermic CA. ETCO2 should not be used in hypothermic CA for predicting outcome.Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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