Dr. Bhakti Patel, who has been studying the devices for six years, said they hold promise as an early intervention that could spare respiratory patients the need to be put on the more traditional — and costly and invasive — ventilators.
"I would love for there to be a silver bullet for this pandemic," said Patel, a pulmonologist at the University of Chicago. "My best hope is that the way it changes the game is that maybe it shaves off the number of patients who need a ventilator — even if it's 1 out of 3 or 1 out of 5."
"If that is the case," Patel added, "that would be a game changer when we're seeing this tidal wave of patients who need a ventilator."
Patel led a first-of-its-kind study in 2016 that tested the Sea-Long helmet against an oxygen mask for a group of 83 intensive care patients suffering from acute respiratory distress. The researchers found that the helmet led to superior outcomes: Patients using them required ventilation 18.2 percent of the time, compared to 61.5 percent for the masks, and had a better 90-day survival rate, according to the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The trial was stopped early because the helmets proved more effective than the masks, resulting in a smaller sample size than originally intended. But Patel believes the device could lead to a sea change in intensive care units that have long relied on traditional ventilators. Those devices require doctors to fully sedate patients and insert a tube into their windpipes, a process that can cause pneumonia and other problems when used for extended periods of time.
"If we take away the ventilator — which comes with this package of sedating people, making them not move, making them sort of not have memory of what's happening — perhaps we could spare some patients some long-term complications," Patel said.
