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Follow on Google News | Add ECG when screening school childrenQuoting a pilot study published in March 15 issue of American Heart Journal, said Padma Shri & Dr. BC Roy National Awardee, Dr. KK Aggarwal
By: HEART CARE FOUNDATION OF INDIA The current American Heart Association guidelines recommend screening only competitive athletes, not all children, with an additional ECG. Only in Italy and Japan there is compulsory screening of all athletes or schoolchildren with ECG. The study evaluated the feasibility of adding an ECG to cardiac screening of healthy school-aged children. In children, sudden cardiac arrest is caused by structural or electrical abnormalities in the heart that frequently cause no symptoms and may go undiagnosed. It results in an estimated over 1000 annual deaths in childhood in the U.S alone. The current study evaluated 400 healthy subjects, 5 to 19 years old with a medical family history questionnaire, a physical examination and an ECG. The study team identified previously undiagnosed cardiac abnormalities in 23 subjects, and hypertension in an additional 20. Ten of the 400 subjects (2.5%) had potentially serious cardiac conditions. Of those 10 subjects, only one had experienced transient symptoms, which was dismissed as unrelated. None of the 10 subjects had a family history of sudden cardiac arrest. It was the ECG who outperformed the history and physical examination and found previously unidentified potentially serious abnormalities that would not have been identified by history and physical examination alone. Children in the screening were not all high school athletes, and most would not have undergone athletic cardiac screening. Regular physical examinations by primary care physicians had not detected the cardiac conditions found in the current study. About HCFI: The only National Not for profit NGO, on whose mega community health education events, Govt. of India has released two National commemorative stamps and one cancellation stamp, and who has conducted one to one training on” Hands only CPR” of 54572 people since 1st November 2012. The CPR 10 Mantra is – “within 10 minutes of death, earlier the better; at least for the next 10 minutes, longer the better; compress the centre of the chest of the dead person continuously and effectively with a speed of 10x10 i.e. 100 per minute.” End
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