A team of researchers found that administering a quick shot of anti-convulsant medication with a spring-loaded syringe is as effective in treating prolonged seizures that do not occur in hospitals as using an intravenous line to administer the medication directly to the bloodstream.

According to James Quinn, a professor of emergency medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine, the benefit of using a shot to treat a full seizure rather than starting an IV is that it takes less accuracy to administer a shot – increasing the chance of success and decreasing the risk that either the patient or the person starting the IV will get inadvertently pricked by the needle.

Among patients to whom the shot was administered, 73 percent were free of seizure symptoms by the time they arrived at the hospital. Among patients receiving the IV treatment, that number is 63 percent. The patients in these trials could be treated with the shot in the study because of federal rules allowing exemptions to those who give informed consent in order to conduct studies that involve life-threatening situations.

In order to implement the trial, approximately 250 Santa Clara and San Mateo firefighters had to be trained to conduct research.

The study, published Feb. 16 in the New England Journal of Medicine, was authored by Stanford researchers alongside researchers from 16 other universities and hospitals across the nation. The National Institutes of Health and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority funded the study. The Department of Defense’s Chemical Biological Medical Systems Joint Project Management Office supplied the spring-loaded syringe injectors.

— Alice Phillips