by Playfuls Staff |
16th March 2007
Surprises never cease to appear as a new study informs that “rescue breathing” is not necessary for people who collapse from a sudden heart attack.
[more]
The real life-savers are the chest compressions. After years of being instructed to alternate between chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth in case someone has a cardiac arrest, we are now told that the situation is actually quite different.
Ken Nagao of the Surugadai Nihon University Hospital in Tokyo, Japan, and colleagues collected information about more than 4000 adults who had suffered a sudden heart attack outside of hospital in the presence of bystanders.
Only 18% of the people whose hearts had stopped beating received full cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), while 11% received chest compressions alone. The other 71% received no CPR from bystanders.
They found that the chance of surviving a cardiac arrest away from a hospital was twice as high if bystanders performed chest compression instead of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Brain damage is the greatest risk in sudden cardiac arrest and those who suffer from it do not live. Those who received only chest compressions and had at least an erratic heartbeat by the time emergency medical staff arrived showed the largest number of survival without brain damage: 19%.
11% of those who received CPR survived through their heart attack without brain damage, while only 8%of the people that were in no way assisted by bystanders had this fortune.
The startlingly small number of first-aiders is partly due to people’s fright of catching infectious diseases. This could be a good thing, as many are not actually fit to do mouth-to-mouth ventilation, experts found.
The Japanese study, published in The Lancet, said chest compressions alone are just as good if not better in most cases. Mouth-to-mouth takes precious time away from chest compressions which have to be continuous to improve the chance of survival.
If the patient had collapsed because of a heart rather than a lung problem, they would probably already have enough oxygen in their body to keep them going without needing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Gordon Ewy, director of the Sarver Heart Centre at the University of Arizona, where chest-compression-only resuscitation was developed, told the Lancet: “For cardiac arrest, the term 'rescue breathing' is actually a paradox. We now know that not only is it not helpful, but it's often harmful.”
“Eliminating the need for mouth-to-mouth ventilation will dramatically increase the occurrence of bystander-initiated resuscitation efforts and will increase survival,” he added.
