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Training Rats to Voluntarily Dive Underwater: Investigations of the Mammalian Diving Response

Training Rats to Voluntarily Dive Underwater: Investigations of the Mammalian Diving Response

Published on: November 12, 2014

Scuba diving injuries among Divers Alert Network members 2010-2011

Shabbar I Ranapurwala¹, Nicholas Bird², Pachabi Vaithiyanathan³

¹Divers Alert Network, Department of Epidemiology, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA, Divers Alert Network, 6 West Colony Place, Durham, NC 27705, USA,

Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine

|July 3, 2014

Abstract

Background:

Scuba diving injuries vary greatly in severity and prognosis. While decompression sickness (DCS) and arterial gas embolism can be tracked easily, other forms of diving injury remain unaccounted for.

Purpose:

The purpose of this paper is to assess rates of overall self-reported scuba-diving-related injuries, self-reported DCS-like symptoms, and treated DCS and their association with diver certification level, diving experience and demographic factors.

Methods:

We analyzed self-reported data from a Divers Alert Network membership health survey conducted during the summer of 2011. Poisson regression models with scaled deviance were used to model the relative rates of reported injuries. Models were adjusted for sex, age, body mass index (BMI) and average annual dives, based on the bias-variance tradeoff.

Results:

The overall rate of diving-related injury was 3.02 per 100 dives, self-reported DCS symptoms was 1.55 per 1,000 dives and treated DCS was 5.72 per 100,000 dives. Diving-related injury and self-reported DCS symptom rates decreased for higher diver certification levels, increasing age, increasing number of average annual dives and for men; they increased for increasing BMI.

Conclusions:

Diving injury rates may be higher than previously thought, indicating a greater burden on the diving community. Self-reported DCS-like symptoms are a small fraction of all dive-related injuries and those receiving treatment for DCS are an even smaller fraction. The small number of divers seeking treatment may suggest the mild nature and a tendency towards natural resolution for most injuries.

Keywords:

DAN - Divers Alert Network Injuries decompression sickness epidemiology health survey recreational diving

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