The chances of surviving cardiac arrest after getting CPR in a hospital are slim and have not improved in more than a decade, a big Medicare study concludes.
Only about 18 percent of such patients live long enough to leave the hospital, researchers found. Blacks fared worse than whites — a disparity only partly explained by more of them being treated in hospitals that did a poorer job of CPR.
Results were published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Researchers led by Dr. William Ehlenbach at the University of Washington in Seattle analyzed the care of 433,985 Medicare patients treated from 1992 through 2005 across the United States.
Survival odds did not substantially change over time, they found. Blacks had survival rates about one-quarter lower than whites. Men, older patients, and people admitted from nursing homes also had lower survival rates after CPR.
Previous research by Dr. Paul S. Chan of St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo., found that one-third of hospitalized patients do not get a potentially livesaving defibrillator shock within the recommended two minutes of suffering cardiac arrest.
Even when CPR is given by these highly trained hospital staffers, chest compressions often are too slow or too shallow to be effective, Chan said.
