After the LA burn, heart attacks and abnormal blood test results increased

In the first 90 days after the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out in January, the caseload at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s emergency room looked different than usual.

There were 46% more visits for heart attacks than normal during the same period over the past seven years. Visits for respiratory diseases increased by 24%. And abnormal blood test results increased by 118%.

These findings were reported in a new lesson published Wednesday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Research, part research project documenting the long-term health effects of fires, includes several recent papers documenting the number of physical disasters.

While other wildfires in the US have consumed many acres or claimed many lives, the Palisades and Eaton fires were particularly dangerous to human health because they burned an unusual mix of materials: trees, brush and organics of a typical wildfire, as well as a toxic stew of cars, batteries, plastics, electronics and other man-made materials.

There is no precedent for a situation that has exposed so many people to this type of smoke, say the authors of this paper.

“Los Angeles has seen wildfires before, it will see wildfires again, but the Eaton fire and the Palisades fire were unique, both in their size, their scale and the sheer amount of material burned,” said Dr. Joseph Ebinger, a Cedars-Sinai cardiologist and first author of the paper.

The team found no significant increase in the total number of visits to the medical center’s emergency room between Jan. 7, the day the fire started, and April 7. The department recorded fewer in-person visits for mental health emergencies and chronic conditions during that period compared to the same period in previous years, said Dr. Susan Cheng, director of public health research at Cedars-Sinai and senior author of the study.

Increased visits for cardiovascular risk factors and other serious sudden illnesses make a difference.

The research team also looked at the results of blood tests taken from patients visiting the ER for serious physical symptoms without an immediate explanation – dizziness without dehydration, for example, or chest pains that could be caused by a heart attack.

Their blood tests returned abnormal results at more than twice the rate seen in previous years. These atypical numbers cross the spectrum of the blood panel, Cheng said. “It could be electrolyte disturbances, changes in protein levels, changes in kidney or liver function.”

The level of abnormal test results persisted over a three-month period, leading the team to conclude that exposure to smoke “has led to some kind of biochemical metabolic stress in the body that may affect not just one but many organ systems,” Cheng said. “That’s what led to the variety of symptoms affecting different people.”

Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Washington who was not part of the Cedars-Sinai team, noted that the study found longer-lasting health effects than similar studies.

Three months is “a long time to see peak visits, as most studies focusing on emergency care use following wildfire smoke exposure find an increase in visits over a week,” Casey said. He his research found a 27% increase in outpatient respiratory visits among Kaiser Permanente Southern California members living within 12.4 miles of burned areas in the week following the fires.

“The LA fires were a devastating event, not only with smoke, but also with evacuations and a lot of pressure on the community, the effects of which are likely to be long-lasting,” Casey said.

31 people are known to have died due to the injuries they received in the fire. But the researchers believe that when taking into account deaths caused by serious health conditions due to secondhand smoke, the real number is much higher.

A a research paper published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. it is calculated that they exist 440 excess death in LA County between Jan. 5 and Feb. 1. That paper looked at deaths caused by a variety of factors, from exposure to air pollution to disruptions in health care due to lockdowns and evacuations.

On Tuesday, a Stanford University team published its findings that exposure to wildfire smoke, in particular, led to the deaths of 14 unidentified people.

Wildfires are a major source of fine particle pollution, particles measuring 2.5 microns or less in diameter that are small enough to cross the barriers that separate the blood from the brain and the outer branches of the lungs.

Compared to other sources, wildfire smoke contains a higher proportion of particles that are small enough to enter the brain after inhalation, Casey told The Times. earlier this year. This smoke is linked to many health problems including dementia, cancer and heart failure.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of wildfires have been unleashed in Western states adequate particle pollution to to reverse the number of years of development under the Clean Air Act and other anti-pollution measures.