IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0172665.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The probability and severity of decompression sickness

Author

Listed:
  • Laurens E Howle
  • Paul W Weber
  • Ethan A Hada
  • Richard D Vann
  • Petar J Denoble

Abstract

Decompression sickness (DCS), which is caused by inert gas bubbles in tissues, is an injury of concern for scuba divers, compressed air workers, astronauts, and aviators. Case reports for 3322 air and N2-O2 dives, resulting in 190 DCS events, were retrospectively analyzed and the outcomes were scored as (1) serious neurological, (2) cardiopulmonary, (3) mild neurological, (4) pain, (5) lymphatic or skin, and (6) constitutional or nonspecific manifestations. Following standard U.S. Navy medical definitions, the data were grouped into mild—Type I (manifestations 4–6)–and serious–Type II (manifestations 1–3). Additionally, we considered an alternative grouping of mild–Type A (manifestations 3–6)–and serious–Type B (manifestations 1 and 2). The current U.S. Navy guidance allows for a 2% probability of mild DCS and a 0.1% probability of serious DCS. We developed a hierarchical trinomial (3-state) probabilistic DCS model that simultaneously predicts the probability of mild and serious DCS given a dive exposure. Both the Type I/II and Type A/B discriminations of mild and serious DCS resulted in a highly significant (p

Suggested Citation

  • Laurens E Howle & Paul W Weber & Ethan A Hada & Richard D Vann & Petar J Denoble, 2017. "The probability and severity of decompression sickness," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(3), pages 1-25, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0172665
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0172665
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0172665
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0172665&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0172665?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0172665. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.