NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – When awake COVID-19 patients are having trouble breathing, doctors may advise them to lie face-down to help their lungs to expand and take in more oxygen, but that’s easier said than done, a new study shows.
Prone positioning is commonly done for sedated patients on mechanical ventilators, but earlier studies have found the position can also be helpful for awake patients with COVID-19 who are having trouble breathing. The new study involved 248 COVID-19 patients who needed oxygen, but not mechanical ventilation. Half of them were encouraged to adopt a prone position for up to two hours four times a day and to sleep in a prone position at night. The rest of the patients could position themselves as they wished.
Ultimately, patients in the prone positioning group only spent about 2.5 hours per day lying face down, mainly because it was too uncomfortable.
It is not clear whether those brief periods of prone positioning yielded any benefits, the researchers wrote in The BMJ. They call for more research into ways to make prone position more tolerable for awake patients.
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/3DcQ3HU The BMJ, online March 23, 2022.
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