Welcome to PICU Doc On Call, a podcast dedicated to current and aspiring intensivists. My name is Pradip Kamat

My name is Rahul Damania, a current 2nd year pediatric critical care fellow. We come to you from Emory University,School of Medicine, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Atlanta, GA.

Today's episode is dedicated to O2 delivery in the PICU. We would like to highlight in this episode Stanford University School of Medicine Pediatric Critical Care's LearnPICU website. The LearnPICU.com website Is dedicated to reviewing clinical topics related to pediatric critical care, and is an open access resources which Is widely accessed worldwide. The website has over 10,000 visits each month, and is managed by Dr. Kevin Kuo - Clinical associate professor of pediatrics pediatric critical care at Stanford University. Dr. Kuo has Been featured on our prior episode entitled seven habits of highly effective Picu fellows, and we are very excited to collaborate with his educational resources to provide you the listener a comprehensive educational experience.

Rahul, let's go ahead and get into today's case.

A 17-year old boy is admitted after he was struck by a car at slow speed while crossing the street.

He is has SPO2 of 98%, HR 98 bpm with a normal capillary refill and perfusion.

His blood gas at admission to the PICU reveals a ph of 7.3/PCO2 35/PaO2 196 mm Hg on 50% NRB with 100% O2 flowing at 12LPM.

His admission hgb is 10.5 gm%.

4 hours post admission, the nurses noticed that the patient is tachycardic to 150s, with a drop in his BP, delayed capillary refill, with cool extremities and increased output from the chest tube.

His SpO2 has decreased to 86% and PaO2 on his blood gas is now 65mm HG. He is found to have a POC Hgb of 6.8 mg/dL.

Let’s take this case and highlight key components of O2 delivery and O2 consumption.

Lets focus on O2 delivery first. Rahul What are the components of O2 delivery ?

Pradip, O2 delivery is made of O2 content X Cardiac output

Simply put, O2 content is the amount of blood present in 100ml of arterial or venous blood. Its is denoted by CaO2 or CvO2 and its unit is mL O2 / dL blood or mL O2 per 100 mL of blood.

Before we introduce the complicated formula, let's just appreciate the variables within the equation.

Oxygen content is going to be a function of three variables:

This is going to be Hgb, Saturations on the hemoglobin also known as SaO2, and the amount of oxygen that is dissolved within the blood also known as your PaO2.

Pradip, Can you elucidate further about O2 content?

O2 content is given by the formula: CaO2 = (1.34X Hgb gm/dl X SaO2) + (0.003X PaO2)

Important points to remember about above formula is that the constant 1.34 (or 1.36 as given by

Oxygen Content and Oxygen Delivery

PICU Doc On Call