Using AEDs and CPR Increases Survival, Study Indicates

{sidebar id=3}MedPage Today (11/7, Phend) reports, "Automated external defibrillators (AEDs) save more than one life per day in real-world use in the United States and Canada," according to findings presented at the American Heart Association meeting in Orlando on Tuesday.  Myron L. Weisfeldt, M.D., of Johns Hopkins University, and colleagues, "studied outcomes from a pre-hospital emergency care trials network, the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium," in order to confirm that "AEDs improved survival even without a specific intervention to train lay volunteers."

The researchers used data from "11 urban and rural sites in the U.S. and Canada, covering a population of about 20 million," and focused on "9,897 nontraumatic, out-of-hospital cardiac arrests that occurred over a one-year period, and were evaluated by emergency medical services personnel." They found that "[c]ombination use of an AED and CPR more than quadrupled survival compared with CPR alone."  In addition, "survival was still 2.45-fold more likely with the combination," after adjusting "for location of the cardiac arrest, paramedic response time, and bystander CPR attempts."

- Submitted by Lynn Artz, Wakulla County Health Care Task Force

This article originally published on November 12, 2007.

Written by :

mkwestmark

 

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