The article I chose for my grade insurance paper is “Albuterol and Insulin therapy in hemodialysis patients. http://www.nature.com/ki/journal/v38/n5/index.html. The reason I chose this article is because we have been going over potassium and action potential in class I have been extremely interested in potassium, part of this is because hyperkalemia is one of the few electrolyte imbalances we can start treatment for in a pre-hospital setting. The article was very informative and allowed me a new learning opportunity, it was fun to learn that some of the physiological process behind the treatment of hyperkalemia expanded into other physiological process such as glucose management and metabolic cycles. The hypothesis for this …show more content…
Patients were then monitored and tested for changes in Plasma blood glucose (pbg) and Potassium levels in the blood. The case study was small including only 12 patients broken up into 3 groups of 4, none of which were diabetics with ages ranging from 34-72, 2 of the patients in the study were removed. The patients were administered either 10 units of insulin and D50, or 20mg of albuterol in 4ml of normal saline (ns) over the course of 10 minutes, or patients were administered a combination of insulin and D50 as well as albuterol. The patients were then monitored for 1 hour with potassium and PBG being assessed every 15mins. All of the patients in the trial were not on beta blockers and had roughly the same lab values at the start of the trial, plasma blood glucose levels around 4.7 millimols per liter and blood potassium levels between 5.48-5.89 millimols per liter. The results of the case study were gathered by using heparinized tubes and a centrifuge immediately. Plasma potassium levels were analyzed using flame photometry (uses flame and flame color to measure concentration of alkali metals in a substance.), blood glucose was analyzed using a Beckman analyzer, and blood insulin levels were measured using radioimmunoassay (uses radioactive antigens to measure concentration of hormones in blood). All results were weighted on an average between the participants of each individual study