–This weeks blog post is an excerpt taken from an CNN article published July 28th, 2010. The new information could save the life of a friend or loved one.
(CNN) — You’re in a restaurant, or at an airport, or on a crowded street. The man or woman next to you crumples to the ground. Do you know what to do? Anyone trained in CPR knows the first step: Check for breathing, and check for a pulse. If there’s no heartbeat — what then?
That question has been the subject of intense debate, especially since 2008 when the American Heart Association said that bystanders could try and keep a cardiac arrest victim alive just by pressing on the chest in a hard, quick rhythm. How fast? The exact pace of the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive.”
A big part of the thinking is that people are more likely to attempt resuscitation if they don’t have to perform rescue breaths, also known as mouth-to-mouth. An unresolved question has been whether chest-compression-only CPR, sometimes known as CCR, is truly just as good as the original. Two large studies published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine seem to provide an answer: yes.
The two papers are remarkably similar in design and results. One was conducted in Washington state — mostly the Seattle suburbs — and in London, England. The other study was done in Sweden. In both cases, patients whose hearts had stopped received either traditional CPR, or a version with chest-compressions only. The patients were divided randomly, with 911 dispatchers giving instructions to callers who performed the CPR.
In the Seattle-London experiment, patients receiving chest compressions without mouth-to-mouth were more likely to survive without brain damage. In both experiments, patients getting chest-compressions only were more likely to survive, period.
To read the full article, visit the CNN Health Page.
