PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 3 (UPI) -- Researchers say hospitals need to rethink the way they treat cardiac arrest.
A study that appears in the Jan. 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that cardiac arrests within a hospital are quite different from those occurring outside the hospital.
"For both children and adults, most in-hospital cardiac arrests are caused by progressive respiratory failure and shock, not by a sudden arrhythmia," said study leader Vinay Nadkarni, M.D., a critical care specialist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
"Many adult physicians assume that the vast majority of adult cardiac arrests in hospitals are from sudden arrhythmias, and life-support protocols reflect this assumption," said Nadkarni. "Our findings show that respiratory failure is more common than arrhythmia in adults, and in such cases emergency procedures should focus on breathing problems."
Just as some physicians incorrectly assume arrhythmia causes most adult cardiac arrests, they often believe sudden arrhythmias to be extremely rare among children suffering cardiac arrest.
"There are a significant number of cases in which children with pulseless cardiac arrest have shockable arrhythmias, and these should be addressed with cardiac, not respiratory, interventions," said Nadkarni.
