Sudden Death from Cardiac Arrest — Improving the Odds

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Abstract
Each year cardiovascular disease claims the lives of more than 950,000 people in the United States. Of these deaths, a substantial proportion are due to out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and only 2 to 5 percent of the 225,000 persons who have sudden cardiac arrest outside a hospital are successfully resuscitated. For those with ventricular fibrillation, these dismal statistics are in stark contrast to the high success rate when defibrillation is performed immediately after the onset of ventricular fibrillation, as in the cardiac catheterization laboratory. It has been shown that for every minute that elapses before defibrillation, 7 to 10 percent of . . .