The KAYLA Foundation
Keeping Alive: Youth Living Actively
On March 29, 2006, Kayla Stanford died suddenly--completely unexpectedly. She had just finished track practice and complained that she wasn't feeling well. She went to the girl's bathroom and was found sometime later, collapsed in the hallway. Kayla died from sudden cardiac arrest.
Our Mission
Our goal is to convince every school district in the United States that each of their schools should have an AED (automated external defibrillator); to have their teachers, coaches and other personnel trained in CPR and the proper use of the AED; and to assist in the purchase of the AEDs for targeted areas via fundraisers, grants and individual gifts.
News
Make A Date With Your Heart
On Valentine's Day, 2017, MinuteClinic® - the retail walk-in medical clinic of CVS Health - will offer free heart health screenings at its more than 1,100 MinuteClinic locations nationwide to help you "Know Your Numbers."
An amended Michigan House Bill 4713, a bill which requires fire and safety drills in schools, was signed by the Senate on February 5, 2014. It previously had been approved by the House in October 2013. It was approved by the Governor and filed with the Secretary of the State on February 25, 2014. The amendment will require schools to include an annual review and evaluation of every school's cardiac emergency response plan. The signing is pictured above, with (from l. to r.) Joceyln Leonard, mother of Wes Leonard, http://www.wesleonardheartteam.org/wes-leornard-heart-foundation/; Randy and Sue Gillary, parents of Kimberly Gillary, http://www.kimberlysgift.org; Michigan Governor Rick Snyder; Represntative Gail Haines (sponsor of HB4272), and Kelly Warren, mother of Kayla Stanford, www.kaylasteam.weebly.com. Portions of HB4272 were added to HB4731 before signing.
February 3-7, 2014: Michigan Schools CPR/AED Drill Week
October 2, 2013, LANSING (AP) Heart Screenings Mandated for Michigan Newborns--
All newborns in Michigan will be screened for critical congenital heart disease starting next year, health officials announced Wednesday.
Pulse oximetry screening will be used statewide starting in April, the Michigan Department of Community Health said. Every Michigan newborn currently is screened for 54 different disorders through bloodspots sent to the state health department.
"This simple non-invasive screening can save lives, giving Michigan's newborns a chance at a healthy start, which is what every baby deserves," said Dr. Matthew Davis, chief medical executive with state Department of Community Health, in a statement.
About 300 babies nationwide are sent home from hospitals each year with undetected congenital heart problems, according to Davis. Failure to detect such problems puts babies at risk of death or other serious complications within the first few days or weeks of life.
According to the state, about 65 Michigan birthing hospitals currently screen for CCHD, and 14 more plan to offer the screening soon. Officials earlier began a demonstration project to work with birthing hospitals on the voluntary use of this heart screening.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2011 approved the addition of CCHD screening to the federally recommended uniform newborn screening panel, and the recommendation was later endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
(Copyright ©2013 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
HealthDay Reporter
(HealthDay News) -- An experimental breath test, designed to quickly identify patients suffering from heart failure simply by analyzing the contents of a single exhaled breath, has demonstrated promise in early trials, a team of researchers says.
The investigators stressed that their evaluation is based on a small group of participating patients, and that more extensive research will have to be done to confirm their initial success.
But by subjecting a patient's breath to a rigorous but fast analysis of the hundreds of so-called volatile organic compounds contained therein, the study team said it has so far been able to correctly diagnose heart failure among newly hospitalized patients with a 100 percent accuracy.
"Every individual has a breath print that differentiates them from other people, depending on what's going on in their body," explained study lead author Dr. Raed Dweik, a staff physician in the department of pulmonary, allergy and critical care medicine with the Respiratory Institute at Cleveland Clinic. "And that print can tell us a lot about a person, what they've been exposed to and what disease they have," he added.
"That's what makes the new field of breath testing so promising, because it is non-intrusive, so there is no risk involved," Dweik said. "And you can do it anywhere, in a clinic, in a hospital, anywhere."
The findings were published March 25 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.The study authors pointed out that the most common reason American patients are admitted to a hospital is when there is a suspicion of heart failure -- a tough-to-treat condition in which the heart's pumping action grows gradually weaker over time.
Currently, a diagnosis of heart failure comes from a variety of factors, according to the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. These include medical history and symptoms, and a physical exam in which a doctor will listen to a patient's heart and lung sounds, and check ankles, feet, legs and abdomen for signs of fluid buildup. Blood tests and an electrocardiogram can help confirm that heart failure exists.
In the new study, to gauge how well the noninvasive breath test could identify heart failure, the team collected exhaled breath samples from 41 patients who had been admitted as in-patients to the Cleveland Clinic.
Of those, 25 had been admitted with a primary diagnosis of "acute decompensated heart failure" while another 16 patients had shown no signs of heart failure but did have other cardiovascular issues. A single breath sample was obtained from each of the patients within 24 hours of admission, as well as from an additional 36 patients with acute decompensated heart failure as an independent point of comparison.
Within two hours of collection, all the samples were subject to the breath test analysis, which relied upon "mass spectrometry" technology to scan the samples for their molecular and chemical compound content. Some of those compounds had been pegged as potential telltale signs of heart failure.
The result: The breath test correctly identified all the patients with heart failure, clearly distinguishing them from those cardiac cases where heart failure was not an issue.
Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that if further research were able to establish its effectiveness, a breath-driven tool for identifying heart failure would be a helpful diagnostic innovation -- but more so in a doctor's office or clinic than in the hospital.
"If it is clear that it is highly reliable and specific and sensitive, then yes, it would be a welcome advance," he said. "But I would say it would be perhaps more helpful for primary care physicians in an outpatient setting, because that is where it's most challenging to identify heart failure. Today a diagnosis in that environment is based on a patient's history and exam, but symptoms for heart failure can easily overlap with a lot of other diagnoses. And the blood work that would be taken in a doctor's office might not come back until the next day, delaying identification," he noted.
"So a breath test would be most useful in that kind of challenging situation," Fonarow said. "But in an emergency room, while there are challenges as well, bedside blood tests are much more readily drawn and quickly analyzed so you can often get the results in minutes. So there may be potentially less of a role for a breath test in that kind of setting."
Study author Dweik added that the test is "theoretically cheap. But of course we're still early in the process of exploring its potential. This study is really a proof of concept. There is much more work that needs to be done to get it to the point where it would become widely available."
The KAYLA Foundation presented an automated external defibrillator (AED) to Dossin elementary school in Detroit Wednesday evening (June 5, 2013).
An AED is a life- saving device that can be used to shock a heart back to a normal rhythm if it has gone into arrest. The KAYLA Foundation stands for Keeping Alive Youth Living Actively and is in honor of Kayla Stanford who was 12 years old when she died after running two miles at track practice at her Ypsilanti middle school.
The Foundation has goals of making sure all schools are equipped with this life saving equipment and spreading awareness about sudden cardiac arrest in youth. Kelly Warren, Kayla’s mom, says the AED should be as common as the fire extinguisher; every public building should have one. “We know that AED’s save lives and we know that kids that are trained to use them save lives too.” In April the KAYLA Foundation, along with the Kimberley Gillary, and Wes Leonard Foundations won a Hometown Hero award from the State of Michigan for their efforts in AED placement, CPR training and Sudden Cardiac Arrest awareness. Alan Pangburn, Safety Manager, Detroit Public Schools said that the Detroit school district is in need of approximately 17 more AED’s. If you would like to donate an AED to the school please contact Alan at 313-401-9240. AED’s cost approximately $1500. For more information about the KAYLA Foundation visit www.kaylasteam.weebly.com.
Governor Snyder has proclaimed April 2013 as Michigan Student Athlete Cardiac Awareness Month
A 9 year and 10 year old use CPR to help save a baby's life. A mother in Marietta, Georgia credits two boys for showing her how to perform CPR on her 12 week old son. They learned how to do CPR from signs posted at their school. Visit http://www.kctv5.com/story/21669305/kids-use-cpr-to-save-baby for more.
We learned today that Governor Rick Snyder has proclaimed Monday, February 4th, 2013 as Michigan Sudden Cardiac Death of the Young Awareness Day
Find it at the following link: http://michigan.gov/mdch/0,4612,7-132-8347-294286--,00.html
Watch Heart Attack 101 Video from WZZM: http://www.wzzm13.com/news/health/healthy_heart/238097/38/Heart-Attack-101-Using-an-AED
Don't Let Your Student become a Statistic: visit http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2011/08/18/dont-let-your-high-school-student-become-a-statistic-of-sudden-cardiac-death/