Most recently, the new “hands-only” CPR guidelines have received a lot of press and attention, and there’s a lot of excellent research showing that any intervention that stops CPR decreases survival. Well, the last time they revised the CPR guidelines, they were also intended to decrease CPR pauses, including changing the manner in which defibrillation was performed, making longer CPR intervals, and eliminating pulse checks after shocks.
The “Resuscitations Outcomes Consortium” did a crossover study looking at survival to hospital discharge before and after the implementation of the new guidelines…and they found no statistically significant differences. They did find a clinically significant improvement in VT/VF survival that went from 14% to 18%, but the p-value was 0.06 – and it’s hard to attribute that solely to the guidelines because there are other significant baseline differences, particularly a 28% to 34% increase in bystander CPR.
Should be interesting to see if widespread implementation of the new CPR guidelines increase overall or subgroup survival.
The paper also mentions their current studies, looking at whether automated devices improve outcomes and when AED analysis should be performed in sequence.