• Simone Savastano, Vincenzo Vanni, Roman Burkart, Maurizio Raimondi, Fabrizio Canevari, Simone Molinari, Enrico Baldi, Aurora I Danza, Maria Luce Caputo, Romano Mauri, Francois Regoli, Giulio Conte, Claudio Benvenuti, and Angelo Auricchio.
• Division of Cardiology, Fondazione IRCCS Policlinico San Matteo, Pavia, Italy. Electronic address: s.savastano@smatteo.pv.it.
• Resuscitation. 2017 Jan 1; 110: 12-17.

PurposeEarly and good quality cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and the use of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) improve cardiac arrest patients' survival. However, AED peri- and post-shock/analysis pauses may reduce CPR effectiveness.MethodsThe time performance of 12 different commercially available AEDs was tested in a manikin based scenario; then the AEDs recordings from the same tested models following the clinical use both in Pavia and Ticino were analyzed to evaluate the post-shock and post-analysis time.ResultsNone of the AEDs was able to complete the analysis and to charge the capacitors in less than 10s and the mean post-shock pause was 6.7±2.4s. For non-shockable rhythms, the mean analysis time was 10.3±2s and the mean post-analysis time was 6.2±2.2s. We analyzed 154 AED records [104 by Emergency Medical Service (EMS) rescuers; 50 by lay rescuers]. EMS rescuers were faster in resuming CPR than lay rescuers [5.3s (95%CI 5-5.7) vs 8.6s (95%CI 7.3-10).ConclusionsAEDs showed different performances that may reduce CPR quality mostly for those rescuers following AED instructions. Both technological improvements and better lay rescuers training might be needed.Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

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