{"id":890,"date":"2020-12-03T09:42:31","date_gmt":"2020-12-03T14:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/?p=890"},"modified":"2020-12-03T09:42:31","modified_gmt":"2020-12-03T14:42:31","slug":"am-i-right-to-be-skeptical-about-pulse-oximeters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/?p=890","title":{"rendered":"Am I right to be skeptical about pulse oximeters?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Question:<\/span><\/strong> My wife bought a pulse oximeter to monitor for potential COVID symptoms (low oxygen?) and I am skeptical.\u00a0 Is there any evidence that pulse oximeters work for COVID-19 monitoring?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Answer:\u00a0<\/span><\/strong>We do have some evidence that pulse oximeters are useful for monitoring COVID symptoms!\u00a0 Pulse oximeters cannot, however, be used as a COVID diagnostic tool.\u00a0 Low blood oxygenation\u00a0indicates a health problem, but does not tell you the cause.\u00a0 Meanwhile, regular oxygenation levels do not indicate absence of infection.\u00a0 I’ll describe the evidence in a moment, but let me first describe\u00a0what a pulse oximeter is\/does.\u00a0\u00a0
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Biology and Pulse Oximeters<\/em><\/strong>: Blood is oxygenated in the lungs and is then pumped by the heart to the tissues. Hemoglobin in red blood cells carries oxygen throughout the body.\u00a0 When hemoglobin is carrying oxygen, it is called “saturated.”\u00a0 And blood that is full of saturated hemoglobin is arterial blood (oxygenated blood).\u00a0 Meanwhile, deoxygenated blood is venous blood.\u00a0 Arterial blood is bright red due to its oxygenation whereas venous blood is dark red.\u00a0 In typical arterial blood, 98% of haemoglobin is saturated (SpO2), however when a person doesn’t get enough oxygen (hypoxia), saturation levels are much lower.\u00a0 NIH’s Clinical Treatment Guidelines<\/a>\u00a0consider COVID-19 cases to be moderate illness when <\/=94% of hemoglobin is saturated, and severe illness when <94% of hemoglobin is saturated.\u00a0 To monitor oxygenation levels, the pulse oximeter painlessly goes on a person’s finger and works by shining small beams of red light through the finger tissue– through the blood– to measure the\u00a0changes of light absorption based on hemoglobin saturation (the light passes differently through arterial and venous blood).\u00a0 For more on this topic, you may find this WHO slidedeck<\/a> helpful.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Pulse Oximeters and COVID<\/em><\/strong>: As mentioned above, pulse oximeters are not a diagnostic tool.\u00a0 That said, they can be very useful for monitoring disease severity and for indicating when you need to seek medical attention.\u00a0 A paper published by the Academy of Emergency Medicine<\/em>, Novel Use of Home Pulse Oximetry Monitoring in COVID\u201019 Patients Discharged From the Emergency Department Identifies Need for Hospitalization<\/a>, found that “home pulse oximetry monitoring identifies need for hospitalization in initially nonsevere COVID\u201019 patients… Half of patients who ended up hospitalized had SpO2 < 92% without worsening symptoms. Home SpO2 monitoring also reduces unnecessary ED revisits.”\u00a0 Another paper published by Applied Clinical Informatics<\/em>, Remote Patient Monitoring Program for Hospital Discharged COVID-19 Patients<\/a>, found that remote patient monitoring that includes pulse oximetry “reduces readmissions for patients with COVID-19 and provides scalable remote monitoring capabilities upon hospital discharge.”\u00a0 And finally, an article published in BMJ,\u00a0\u00a0What items should be included in an early warning score for remote assessment of suspected COVID-19?<\/a>, found that pulse oximetry is an important component of an early warning prediction– indicating when a patient needs to seek higher level medical care.\u00a0 All that to say, if you have COVID or COVID-like symptoms and are managing at home (including after hospital discharge) you should use a pulse oximeter to help monitor disease severity (note: pulse oximeters are pretty inexpensive and easy to\u00a0acquire).\u00a0 And if your oxygenation\u00a0levels drop, you must seek immediate medical care!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Question: My wife bought a pulse oximeter to monitor for potential COVID symptoms (low oxygen?) and I am skeptical.\u00a0 Is there any evidence that pulse oximeters work for COVID-19 monitoring?\u00a0\u00a0 Answer:\u00a0We do have some evidence that pulse oximeters are useful for monitoring COVID symptoms!\u00a0 Pulse oximeters cannot, however, be used as a COVID diagnostic tool.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":891,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[40,34],"tags":[63],"class_list":["post-890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-disease-severity","category-symptoms","tag-blood-type","fallback-thumbnail"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/covidqanda.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/pexels-photo-4483329.jpeg?fit=1880%2C1253&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":892,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions\/892"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/covidqanda.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}