I like that the big focus these days is on increasing cerebral perfusion pressure in cardiac arrest – sure, we can focus on more interventions to flog the heart back into coordinated activity, but, sometimes, it’s just not going to happen. But, for when we are able to get the heart rolling again, unless you’re a big organ donation proponent, we need to preserve neurologic outcomes. After all, that’s where a lot of our studies of ACLS fall off – we get short-term ROSC, but survival to hospital discharge is unchanged because the brain is unrecoverable.
Here’s another trick in pigs – sustained AA pressure resulting in measurable increases in CPP. Better CPP = better neurologic outcomes in other studies. Seems like a no-brainer.
I particularly like this intervention because it’s basically no-cost and should be easy to test for outcome efficacy in humans.