As legend has it, in 490 BC, when the Greeks defeated the Persians at the battlefield known as Marathon, the Greek messenger Pheidippides was sent to Athens to announce the victory. He ran the entire 26.22 miles. The marathon was born. But Pheidippides dropped dead. More than two millennia later, in the US, about two… Read More…
The woman slumps to the floor beside her office desk… No one sees her go down… A colleague hears a thud and rushes in… He calls her name… No response… He checks for a pulse: nothing… “Call 911!” he yells. EMS arrives quickly, and finds the co-worker panicked, but performing good quality chest compressions he… Read More…
Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest claims hundreds of thousands of lives each year worldwide. Successful resuscitation is challenging but achievable, requiring an interdependent set of actions that consist of early arrest recognition, early cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), early defibrillation, expert advanced life support, and timely postresuscitation care. In a multicenter, randomized trial, Rea et al. compared survival rates… Read More…
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) was developed over 50 years ago as a rapid intervention in patients with cardiac or respiratory arrest. The combination of both external chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth rescue breathing is intended to maintain oxygenation of the brain and the heart. Since its inception, CPR has undergone only minimal revision in method. Decades of… Read More…
