August 5, 2015 – More CPR

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Anchor lead: When more bystanders perform CPR more people survive, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Greater numbers of people are performing CPR when they witness a heart attack, with the result that almost twice as many heart attack victims are surviving to be discharged from the hospital, two recent studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association report. Gordon Tomaselli, director of cardiology at Johns Hopkins, comments.

Tomaselli: The survival for out of hospital cardiac arrest has been abysmal. What we know is that if you can support the circulation with good CPR until more advanced rescue gets there, chances of survival improves dramatically.  One of the key things the AHA and others have done recently is to go to this philosophy of hands only CPR.  Here we know that even if you just provide chest compressions that will move air in and out of the lungs but more importantly it will support the circulation until you can correct the abnormal cardiac rhythm.  :32

So learn CPR, Tomaselli says.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.