End Tidal CO2; Roadside to Resus

The Resus Room

Simon Laing

Science, Emergencymedicine, Medicine, Health & Fitness, Em, Ae

4.8 • 678 Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2024

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

End Tidal CO2, or ETCO2 for short, is something that’s talked about pretty often in Emergency and Critical Care and that’s because it’s used a lot in the assessment and treatment of patients!

It’s got a big part to play in airway management, resuscitation, sedation and is also increasingly used in other situations. Some of these applications have some pretty strong evidence to back them up but others are definitely worth a deeper thought, because without a sound understanding of ETCO2 we can fall foul of some traps…

ETCO2 is a non-invasive measurement of the partial pressure of CO2 in expired gas at the end of exhalation. Ideally we’d like to know what’s really going on arterially with the partial pressure of arterial CO2 but we can use the end tidal because that’s an easy reading to get from exhaled breath, when it will most closely resemble the alveolar CO2 concentration.

Its value is reflective of ventilation but also really importantly is affected by the circulation, the circuit and how it’s applied. In the podcast we run through all of these aspects, its application to clinical care and also some of its pitfalls.

Once again we’d love to hear any thoughts or feedback either on the website or via X @TheResusRoom!

Simon, Rob & James

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the recess room podcast.
0:03.5	Five, four, three, two, one, fire.
0:12.4	So hi, and welcome back to the recess room podcast.
0:15.7	I'm Simon Lang.
0:17.1	I'm Rob Fenwick.
0:18.0	And I'm James Yates.
0:19.0	And we're back with another episode of Roadside to
0:22.0	recess oh my god this just sounds the same every single time and this time we're back with
0:27.4	n-tidal CO2 if it ain't broke don't fix it langus if it ain't broke don't fix it I think that's a
0:33.3	matter of opinion Rob but yeah you're fine and it is Simon that opens every episode with exactly the same phraseology, so,
0:40.2	you know, maybe you could switch it up next time, Simon.
0:42.5	Like a comfy pair of slippers, though.
0:44.2	That's what you want, isn't it?
0:45.3	Feel safe.
0:48.0	But, you look, we're focusing on end-tidal CO2 this month, aren't we, when we get around
0:51.3	to it? And this is one of those topics that sort of is so obvious, we've missed it. You know, it's there right in your face. We're dealing with it
0:57.3	all the time. But actually, we've never sort of stepped back and really thought about the depths of
1:01.8	CO2. So I guess that's what we're up to this month, think. And again, like we do with all of these episodes,
1:11.1	learn absolutely heaps from doing the prep. So hopefully we can pass even a little bit of that
1:15.6	on that. That would be good. Excellent. Well, before we get into it, a huge thanks to Zol Medical
1:21.0	Corporation, who collaborate with us on the podcast and make this all free and open access,
1:26.6	along with the CPD portal as well, which again
	...

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