CPR during cardiac arrest: someone’s life is in your hands

Cardiac arrest is the ultimate 911 emergency. The heart stops sending blood to the body and brain, either because it is beating too fast and too erratically, or because it has stopped beating altogether. Oxygen-starved brain cells start to die. Death occurs in minutes — unless a bystander takes matters into his or her hands and starts cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Doing CPR keeps blood circulating until trained and better-equipped first responders arrive on the scene to jump-start the heart back into a normal rhythm. “The brain is the most sensitive of the body’s organs to oxygen deprivation,” says Robert Graham, a health policy scholar at George Washington University and chair of a National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) committee that recently released a massive new report on ways to improve survival from cardiac arrest. “If you can continue blood flow to the brain for those five, seven, or ten minutes until the first responders get there, you have given that person the best chance that they have toward recovery.” New evidence backs better survival with CPR In this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), two teams of researchers provide compelling proof of the principle that “time equals brain,” and that efforts to improve the response to cardiac arrests can pay off. In the ideal scenario, a bystander witnesses an individual go into cardiac arrest calls 911 starts CPR righ...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Heart Health cardiac arrest CPR Source Type: news