 | | | | Related Healthscout Videos | |
|
FRIDAY, March 16 (HealthDay News) -- Adding mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to chest compression hurt, rather than helped, the survival of people who suffered cardiac arrest, a Japanese study found.
The study examined more than 4,000 adults who got emergency treatment from bystanders when they collapsed because their hearts stopped beating. The result: better neurological function in 10.1 percent of those who had only chest compression that started within four minutes of cardiac arrest, compared to 5.1 percent of those who also were given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Text Continues Below
Similar benefits for chest compression alone were found for people who suffered abnormal heart rhythms and those with the breathing difficulty called apnea.
"However, there was no evidence of any benefit from the addition of mouth-to-mouth ventilation in any subgroup," the researchers reported.
The findings are published in the March 17 issue of the British journal The Lancet.
The report could lead to a further change in American Heart Association guidelines for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), said Dr. Gordon Ewy, director of the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center, who has been proposing such a change for years. He wrote an editorial accompanying the journal report.
"Based on research conducted in our experimental resuscitation laboratory, we have been advocating chest compression alone for cardiac arrest," Ewy said. "We have done that because our surveys indicated that people are more likely to do bystander resuscitation if they have to do chest compression only, rather than having to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation."
Bystanders hesitate to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation partly because they dislike the physical contact and potential risk of infectious disease, and partly because "it is a very complex psychomotor skill, and people are afraid that they might hurt the person," Ewy said.
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >>
|
.gif)
