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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Have you ever witnessed a person collapse and not know what to do? Children in the room may have the solution in a life-threatening situation.
According to researchers at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, children as young as nine years old have the mental capacity to retain information on life support. During the study, 147 schoolchildren received six hours of life support training. Four months later, 86 percent of the children performed CPR correctly. Skills taught to the children included automatic defibrillator deployment, providing CPR, using the recovery position and calling emergency services.
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The study supports the need for CPR training in schools. "Even if physical strength may limit CPR effectiveness, cognitive skills are not dependant on age," researchers were quoted as saying. "And with periodic retraining, children's performance would likely improve over time."
SOURCE: BioMed Centrals open-access journal Critical Care, July 2009
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