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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 "Don't worry about what others will think -- just go," she said.
Lee agreed. "If you're having symptoms, and they persist for more than a few minutes, seek medical care. If you wait, you may never make it to the hospital," he said, adding, "If you look at people who died suddenly, they often had symptoms but ignored them."
A recent study in the journal Circulation looked at the events leading up 406 cardiac arrests and found that many of these people had symptoms prior to the cardiac arrest, sometimes for as long as two hours beforehand.
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Two-thirds of these cardiac arrests were witnessed by someone. And 25 percent of those people whose cardiac arrest was witnessed by someone else experienced chest pain, and 17 percent had breathlessness.
The survival rate for people in the study who received CPR was around 23 percent, compared to just 4 percent for those who didn't receive CPR. People who went into cardiac arrest in a public place were more likely to get CPR than people whose hearts stopped at home.
"What this study suggests is that most people do have a warning, many of them had more than one hour, which is more than enough time for EMS to get there. Most people who die suddenly, die of an irregular rhythm," said Lee, and that's the type of problem that defibrillators were designed to correct.
The bottom line, said Lee, is don't wait. "There's a fear that you'll feel stupid if you go to the hospital, and you're OK. But, if you want to be 100 percent sure, you're risking your life."
More information
To learn more about cardiac arrest, visit the American Heart Association.
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