Copyright 2006 The Columbus Dispatch
All Rights Reserved
By Dr. GRANT MORROW
The Columbus Dispatch (Ohio)
Home fires kill several thousand people a year in the United States. Only half of these fires occur during the night, and the chance of death is related more to whether the victim is asleep than whether the fire occurs during the day or night.
Children are at higher risk because they often do not awaken even when there is a loud noise. Research has shown that smoke alarms now in use are less effective in waking children than adults. In previous studies, scientists demonstrated that sleeping people hearing their first names experience a different response than when they hear another person’s name or an unrelated noise.
Researchers at Columbus Children’s Hospital decided to study whether smoke alarms using a mother’s voice calling out her child’s first name would be more effective in rousing the child and allowing him or her to escape from the room.
Six- to 12-year-old volunteers were admitted to the Children’s sleep laboratory for study. Their muscle movements and brain waves were recorded to let investigators know when they were in the deepest stage of sleep.
At that point, louder-than-usual smoke alarms were sounded.
The alarms had either a conventional tone or a recording of a mother’s voice calling out her child’s first name and telling him or her to wake up and leave the room.
Each child was tested using both types of alarms.
Ninety-six percent of the children awoke to the alarms that used their mothers’ voices. Almost
40 percent of these children did not awaken to the tone alarm.
The fact that 83 percent were able to escape from the room in time when awakened by the parent alarm compared with only 38 percent with the tone is important, because most of the childhood deaths in home fires are attributed to smoke inhalation.
The results of the study were presented to a committee of the National Fire Protection Association in October and the association plans to recommend a revision to the National Fire Alarm Code. If this change is enacted, it will save children’s lives.
Children are not small adults. Their bodies use medications differently, they have special medical needs and they react uniquely to their environments.
Dr. Grant Morrow is medical director of the Columbus Children’s Research Institute at Children’s Hospital.