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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Knowing CPR and when to use it saves countless lives, and new research shows eliminating the mouth-to-mouth could double survival rates.
In a new study reported by the University of Arizona, a person's chance of surviving a cardiac arrest outside a hospital was found to be twice as high when bystanders performed CPR with continuous chest compressions than when they performed standard CPR with mouth-to-mouth breathing.
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Researchers found while 5 percent of cardiac arrest victims survived without CPR, 6 percent of those who received standard CPR survived. If bystanders performed chest compressions without mouth-to-mouth breathing, the survival rate jumped to 11 percent.
In victims whose collapse was witnessed and whose heart was in a rhythm most likely to respond to a defibrillator shock, survival with standard CPR was 19 percent, while survival with continuous chest compressions was 32 percent.
"This study is the first to show that bystanders can raise the odds of survival by giving continuous chest compressions rather than the type of CPR they are being taught in most certification processes," Gordon A. Ewy, M.D., director of the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center, was quoted as saying. "If we can get more people to act, more patients who were on the brink of death will be walking out of the hospital neurologically intact."
The study included 4,850 out-of-hospital cardiac arrest cases in Arizona that occurred between 2005 and 2009. Results show of those who performed CPR, 77 percent chose chest compressions without mouth-to-mouth.
Source: Presented at the American Heart Association's Resuscitation Symposium in Orlando, Fla., November 15, 2009
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