• Jan-Aage Olsen, Cathrine Brunborg, Mikkel Steinberg, David Persse, Fritz Sterz, Michael Lozano, Mark Westfall, David T Travis, E Brooke Lerner, Marc A Brouwer, and Lars Wik.
• Norwegian National Advisory Unit on Prehospital Emergency Medicine, Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway; Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. Electronic address: janao@janao.info.
• Resuscitation. 2015 Aug 1;93:158-63.

BackgroundShorter manual chest compression pauses prior to defibrillation attempts is reported to improve the defibrillation success rate. Mechanical load-distributing band (LDB-) CPR enables shocks without compression pause. We studied pre-shock pause and termination of ventricular fibrillation/pulseless ventricular tachycardia 5s post-shock (TOF) and return of organized rhythm (ROOR) with LDB and manual (M-) CPR.MethodsIn a secondary analysis from the Circulation Improving Resuscitation Care trial, patients with initial shockable rhythm and interpretable post-shock rhythms were included. Pre-shock rhythm, pause duration (if any), and post-shock rhythm were obtained for each shock. Associations between TOF/ROOR and pre-shock pause duration, including no pause shocks with LDB-CPR, were analyzed with Chi-square test. A p-value <0.05 was considered statistically significant.ResultsFor TOF and ROOR analyses we included 417 LDB-CPR patients with 1476 and 1438 shocks, and 495 M-CPR patients with 1839 and 1796 shocks, respectively. For first shocks with LDB-CPR, pre-shock pause was associated with TOF (p=0.049) with lowest TOF (77%) for shocks given without pre-shock compression pause. This association was not significant when all shocks were included (p=0.07) and not for ROOR. With M-CPR there were no significant associations between shock-related chest compression pause duration and TOF or ROOR.ConclusionFor first shocks with LDB-CPR, termination of fibrillation was associated with pre-shock pause duration. There was no association for the rate of return of organized rhythm. For M-CPR, where no shocks were given during continuous chest compressions, there were no associations between pre-shock pause duration and TOF or ROOR.Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

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