Emergent care of lightning and electrical injuries

Abstract

High-voltage electrical injuries may be devastating, with extensive burns, cardiac arrest, amputations, and long, complicated hospitalizations. Low-voltage injuries, after other pathologic and high-voltage sources are ruled out, tend to be rather benign acutely although they may have significant long-term morbidity, including chronic pain syndromes. Lightning injuries affect 800 to 1000 persons per year. In lightning injury, cardiac arrest is the main cause of death, burns tend to be superficial, ad injuries often are what one would expect of short-circuiting or overloading the body's electrical systems (tinnitus, blindness, confusion, amnesia, cardiac arrhythmias, and vascular instability). Although high-voltage injuries may require the services of trauma surgeons, in general, therapy for low-voltage and lightning injury is supportive and involves cardiac resuscitation for the more seriously injured and supportive care for the less severely injured. Long-term problems from sleep disturbances, anxiety attacks, pain syndromes, peripheral nerve damage, fear of storms (for lightning patients), and diffuse neurologic and neuropsychologic damage may occur in both electrical and lightning patients. Other sequelae--such as seizures or severe brain damage from hypoxia during cardiac arrest and spinal artery syndrome from vascular spasm--are indirect results of electrical and lightning injury.