Overzealous cardiac massage leading to unintentional infant death

Avoiding Parental Distress When Discussing About Sudep: the Albanian Experience

“…Discussing the nature of an epileptic fit, sharing the family experience and projecting simple video explanations to them, are all very helpful in a setting where iatrogenic damages, such as tongue extraction or teeth breaking during awkward attempts to interrupt an apnea that normally accompanies a seizure (26), are extremely common, even among Albanian families living since years with epileptic patients. Recently an Albanian casuistic has been made available, with an unlucky case of infant death during a 'crying spell', when an overzealous and non-professional external chest massage caused myocardial contusion and cardiac arrest (27). In a small-scale descriptive study, a group of Albanian pediatricians and of other specialties has found difficulties in the families' understanding of 'epilepsy' as a disorder: thus, 31% of the parents interviewed were feeling unsafe; and another 7% as hopeless (28).…”