Resuscitation
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Randomized Controlled Trial Multicenter Study Clinical Trial
Measuring survival rates from sudden cardiac arrest: the elusive definition.
Measuring survival from sudden out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OOH-CA) is often used as a benchmark of the quality of a community's emergency medical service (EMS) system. The definition of OOH-CA survival rates depends both upon the numerator (surviving cases) and the denominator (all cases). ⋯ Reported OOH-CA rates and survival rates vary widely, depending upon the definitions applied to events. Rigorous assessment of treatments applied to improve survival can be obscured by inappropriate definitions. Large-scale randomized interventions designed to improve survival from OOH-CA can be evaluated based upon the absolute numbers of patients surviving, rather than a change in the proportion surviving.