June 25, 2008
According to the American Heart Association, sudden cardiac arrest claims about 340,000 lives each year – or about 930 every day in the United States. The leading cause of death in America, sudden cardiac arrest kills more people than breast cancer, lung cancer, and AIDS combined. And according to the most recent data available, 95 percent of all cardiac arrest victims die.
Sudden cardiac arrest is caused by a life-threatening abnormal heart rhythm that can result from a heart attack, respiratory arrest, drowning, electrocution, choking or trauma.
In some cases, there is no known cause and it can happen to anyone regardless of age or gender.
There is a way to increase survival rates, though. It’s quick access to an automated external defibrillator.
On a megayacht, you cannot expect emergency medical help to arrive quickly, so if a fellow crew member or guest goes into cardiac arrest, start CPR and use the AED as soon as you can.
On land, in populated areas the paramedics usually arrive in about 10 minutes. While at sea, help is usually not that close, but you still should radio for help.
CPR, the abbreviation for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, is the manual circulation of blood and the manual introduction of oxygen into the lungs of someone who is not breathing. This is done by chest compressions and rescue breathing.
Many people mistakenly believe that CPR will restart a failing heart, but this is not generally true. CPR is unlikely to restart the heart; it is intended to manually move oxygenated blood to the brain, which delays permanent brain damage. CPR buys us time until we can use the AED to shock the heart back to a normal heart beat.
In most instances, to restart the heart you will need an AED. Unlike the defibrillators with the paddles you see on television, the AEDs that are in many public places such as airports, marinas, shopping malls, churches and schools are safe to use.
These AEDs are designed only to shock dead people. By this I mean that these public access defibrillators will not shock a living, breathing person because they are designed to shock only people who are no longer breathing. You can’t connect someone up to this AED and shock them unless they are no longer breathing and are experiencing two unique types of heart rhythms.
The AED automatically diagnoses the potentially life threatening cardiac arrhythmias of ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia in a victim and is able to treat the patient by an electrical shock which stops the arrhythmia, allowing the heart to re-establish an effective rhythm.
The are designed to be simple so that anyone can use one.
As an retired EMT who now teaches classes on using AEDs and CPR, I often start my classes by selecting someone who has never seen an AED and I ask them to demonstrate how to use it by following its voice instructions.
To date, the youngest person to effectively demonstrate the AED in one of my classes was 10 years old.
There are six major companies that are manufacturing Automated External Defibrillators in the United States and most range in price from $1,195 to $1,700. I prefer the Cardiac Science Powerheart G3, which is fully automatic. It does not have any buttons, so all you have to do is open the lid and the unit turns on. Its voice commands instruct you to place the pads on the victims bare chest and stand clear while it looks for signs of life.
If there are no life signs, the unit will deliver a shock automatically and then direct you to administer CPR for two minutes before putting the device back on the person so that it can check again for life signs.
When someone suffers cardiac arrest, we have a few minutes to change their odds of survival. For every minute a cardiac arrest victim is not defibrillated, his or her chances of survival declines up to 10 percent.
If it takes emergency medical personnel eight minutes to get to the victim, the chance of survival is now about 20 percent. Don’t forget that brain death starts to occur in just four to six minutes after someone experiences sudden cardiac arrest.
In any medical emergency, one of the first and most important things we need to do is to get help. Dialing 911 or, if at sea, using the radio for help is essential.
The next step in treating cardiac arrest is to send someone to get the AED and begin CPR. When the AED arrives it should immediately be turned on and applied to the victim’s bare chest.
If all of this occurs quickly, your victim’s chances of survival will grow from 5 percent to about 80 percent.
These are the odds we would all like to see whether it’s a stranger, a family member, coworker or friend lying on the ground.
Keith Murray is a retired Florida firefighter EMT and the owner of The CPR School, a mobile training company that provides CPR, AED and First Aid training. He also sells and services Automated External Defibrillators. Murray can be reached at 1+561-762-0500. Comments on this column are welcome at editorial@the-triton.com .
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