Defibrillators Easy to Use, Save Lives
B O S T O N, Oct. 25 -- Your chances of surviving sudden cardiac arrest outside of a hospital are one in 20.
But your odds improve 10-fold if an electronic defibrillator is close at hand, according to two new studies in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine that tracked the devices’ use in Las Vegas casinos and American Airlines flights.
Defibrillators are portable versions of the emergency room electronic shock paddles seen on shows like ER. The size of a laptop computer, they work by shocking the heart back into its groove after an abnormal heart rhythm or arrhythmia disrupts the heartbeat.
Without immediate defibrillator treatment, studies have found a 2 to 5 percent survival rate in urban areas for the 350,000 Americans who go into sudden cardiac arrest each year. That’s because for every minute lost, survival drops by 10 percent. By 10 minutes, the average time it can take for help to arrive, it is almost always too late.
Lives Could Be Saved If defibrillators were more widely available, say proponents including the American Heart Association, up to 100,000 American lives could be saved annually.
With thousands of portable defibrillators sold to date, the devices are beginning to appear in a variety of public venues, from Grand Central Station in New York City to Chicago O’Hare International Airport. In May, President Clinton called for the devices to be in placed in all federal buildings and in all U.S. airline planes within three years.
Today, CVS pharmacy, in conjunction with Agilent Technologies in Seattle, announced it will begin selling on its Web site the $2,999 devices directly to consumers with a doctor’s prescription.
To further foster their use, two pieces of legislation nearing passage in Congress would establish a ‘good Samaritan’ clause lessening liability concerns and provide funding for the machines in rural areas.
Easy to Use While critics have worried if the devices can be used effectively by those without medical training, these two studies add to the growing body of empirical evidence that they can, says Dr. Terence Valenzuela, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
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