Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) in COVID‐19 (research up to June 2020)
Citation: Haiduc AA, Alom S, Melamed N, et al. Role of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation in COVID‐19: A systematic review. Journal of Cardiac Surgery. 2020;35(10):2679-87.
What is this? Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) has been suggested as a treatment for COVID-19 patients.
In this systematic review, the authors searched for studies of ECMO for supporting the cardiorespiratory system in COVID-19 patients. They restricted their searches to articles published in English. They do not report the date of their search but the manuscript was submitted to the journal on 15 June 2020. They included 25 articles (3428 COVID-19 patients, of whom 479 required ECMO).
What was found: At the time of this review, the included studies suggest that while ECMO is beneficial in some patients, the recuperative effects of ECMO are uncertain.