Home mechanical ventilation in Sweden, with reference to Danish experiences

The Swedish Society of Chest Medicine has started a national register of pa tients on home mechanical ventilation, to establish reliable national preva lence data and to accurately document patient and treatment characteristics to enable a scientific evaluation of this treatment. In this first collection of retrospective register data, covering patients on home mechanical ventilation at the register start on I January 1996, we found 541 patients, corresponding to 6.1/100 000 inhabitants, using home me chanical ventilation. Non-invasive ventilation, night-time ventilation and volume controlled ventilation dominated. We found four diagnosis categories of approximately equal size, namely post -polio, chest wall deformities, neuromuscular diseases and 'other diseases' . The age distribution was bimodal, with one small peak in the 20-29 year g roup and a large peak in the 60-69 year group. A survey of Danish patients on home mechanical ventilation showed that they were considerably younger a nd that almost half of them suffered from neuromuscular diseases. Further w ork will be done to follow the situation in Sweden and in Denmark to elucid ate the obvious differences in the selection of patients for home mechanica l ventilation (C) 2000 HARCOURT PUBLISHERS LTD.