Cardiac Arrest: Difference between revisions

Survival of cardiac arrest continues to be very poor. In-hospital cardiac arrest has a survival to hospital discharge of 17,6% all rhythms. Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest has a worse survival with 10,7% survival to hospital discharge for all rhythms. Survival is dependent on the characteristics of the cardiac arrest (rhythm), on the patient’s medical history, and the time between the cardiac arrest en start of resuscitation. The introduction of the automated external defibrillator (AED) has dramatically increased survival of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest victims.<cite>ESC, Nolan1</cite> In this chapter we give an overview of basic life support (BLS) and advanced life support (ALS) based on the recommendation of the European Resuscitation Council Guidelines for Resuscitation 2010.

To increase survival after cardiac arrest it is vital to decrease the time to resuscitation. The training of persons in BLS can increase bystander participation in performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). When non-arrest victims inadvertently receive CPR it is extremely rare to inflict serious harm (2% chance of a fracture). Furthermore the risk of disease transmission is extremely low, especially without high-risk activities as intravenous canulation. A straightforward protocol has been created to execute BLS (Figure 1).<cite>Koster2</cite>