Resuscitation
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Observational Study
The relationship between chronic health conditions and outcome following out-of-hospital ventricular fibrillation cardiac arrest.
The cumulative burden of chronic health conditions could contribute to out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) physiology and response to attempted resuscitation. Yet little is known about how chronic health conditions influence prognosis. We evaluated the relationship between cumulative comorbidity and outcome following ventricular fibrillation OHCA using 3 different scales. ⋯ Based on these results, cumulative comorbidity can help explain survival variability and improve prognostic accuracy. Whether information about cumulative comorbidity or specific health conditions can inform resuscitation care is unknown though the results suggest comorbidity may influence acute pathophysiology and treatment response.
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Few data are available on the use of brainstem auditory evoked potentials (BAEPs) in combination with other electrophysiological tools to assess prognosis of comatose survivors from cardiac arrest (CA). ⋯ In this series of patients after CA, at least one of the BAEP waves was absent bilaterally in half the survivors; however, their use for prediction of poor neurological outcome remains limited.
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Mortality from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is characterized by substantial regional variation. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) recently recommended enhancing the capabilities of EMS systems to improve outcome. In this study, we analyzed the trend in outcome from ventricular fibrillation/pulseless ventricular tachycardia (VF/pVT) OHCA in Rochester, MN. Survival from these forms of arrest is commonly employed as a benchmark of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) system performance. ⋯ We observed a significant improving secular trend in neurologically intact survival from VF/pVT cardiac arrests with a relatively high recent survival rate in this EMS System.