STUDY 1 : THE CIRC TRIAL
This is a Zoll funded study that looks at Zoll’s ‘autopulse’. I reviewed the autopulse back in 2007. The study commenced in 2007 and had a total of 4231 patients recruited. The results were just presented at the American Heart Association’s, Resuscitation Science Symposium. The results reported, were that the autopulse is equivalent to high quality manual CPR. I await the data on this so I can review. If this is the case, it would be advantageous to have high quality CPR all the time, ie the correct rate, and depth and duty cycle. It would be constant and not change based on human error.
STUDY 2 THE ARCTIC STUDY This study was run by the Virginia University Medical Centre and was also just presented at the American Heart Associations’s Resuscitation Science Symposium. The study dealt with out of hospital cardiac arrest and did the following: -Mechanical chest compressions -Airway management -Drugs for ROSC -Cold Salive IV before there was ROSC Cold saline is very controversial. Some studies indicate it decreases coronary perfusion pressure, whilst there is some work out there indicating that it has an effect on arrhythmia. Very interesting. Figures of survival of 18% overall and 72% in VF arrest! What?! I await the paper, as it may change the way we resuscitate, if it is indeed as good as is reported.
