Failure of Open-Heart Massage to Improve Survival after Prehospital Nontraumatic Cardiac Arrest

Abstract

To the Editor: Recent animal and human research has called into question the mechanism and effectiveness of conventional cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).^{1 2 3 4 5} Several large clinical series have demonstrated that survival is negligible among patients who have a cardiac arrest outside the hospital and who require more than eight minutes of CPR before advanced life-support measures become available.^{6 7 8} Patients who do not respond to prehospital resuscitative efforts are rarely resuscitated in the emergency department if their presenting rhythms are other than ventricular fibrillation or ventricular tachycardia⁹ (and Eisenberg MS: personal communication).Clinical data from the 1960s suggest that markedly improved cardiac output . . .