If you are having a cardiac arrest, your odds of surviving it are doubled if someone near you knows how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). A system that uses cell phones to alert CPR-trained bystanders who are nearby can help make that happen.
These findings are from two studies from Sweden that were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The first study looked at 30,381 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests that occurred in Sweden between 1990 and 2011 to see if CPR was performed before emergency personnel arrived and whether that was associated with the victim surviving for 30 days. More than three million people in Sweden are trained in CPR. The researchers found that CPR was started in advance of emergency personnel arriving in about 15,512 cases. The 30-day survival rate for these patients was 10.5% compared to 4% when CPR was not performed. The rate was higher when CPR was started within three minutes of a person collapsing.
The second study was a randomized control study of a system where cell phones were used to locate people trained in CPR who were within 500 meters of a person in cardiac arrest. Almost 10,000 trained volunteers took part in the study. The phone would alert the bystander to the emergency. The locator system was activated when emergency services were alerted. In this study, bystanders were either dispatched to help or not dispatched. The system was activated for 667 cardiac arrests. The rate of CPR that was started by bystanders who were alerted by phone was 62% and 48% for when bystanders were not alerted by phone.
"The message we are trying to send out is, take a CPR course and act," said Dr. Leif Svensson, one of the coauthors of the first study. "If you don't have the knowledge, act anyway. You cannot harm anyone by doing just chest compression."