Dear Editor, The study by Grmec et al. is encouraging given the very high mortality of trauma victims who experience out-ofhospital pulseless electrical activity (PEA) arrest [1, 2]. In the treatment group there were three interventions: vasopressin, hypertonic saline and hydroxyethyl starch (hypertonic hydroxyethyl starch in the study). However, caution is to be advocated in the use of hydroxy...

Results We included 267 cardiac arrests, 175 out-of-hospital and 92 in-hospital arrests. The cardiac arrests were distributed with 21 % in daytime (08-16), 27 % in the evening (16-00) and 24 % at night (00-08). The causes of cardiac arrests were acute coronary syndrome in 24 %, respiratory insufficiency in 13 %, hypotension in 5 %, arrhythmias in 3 %, other causes in 15 % and unknown in 40 %. T...

OBJECTIVE To report the incidence, characteristics and outcome of adult in-hospital cardiac arrest in the United Kingdom (UK) National Cardiac Arrest Audit database. METHODS A prospectively defined analysis of the UK National Cardiac Arrest Audit (NCAA) database. 144 acute hospitals contributed data relating to 22,628 patients aged 16 years or over receiving chest compressions and/or defibril...

Piezoelectric materials show nonlinear hysteresis behaviour when they are under high electrical field and mechanical load. Fundamental study of PEA depicts that the Hysteresis effect deteriorate the tracking performance of The PEA. This paper proposes a nonlinear model which quantifies the Hysteresis nonlinearity generated in Piezoactuators in response to applied driving voltages. A novel perfe...

AIM Current consensus guidelines for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) recommend that chest compressions resume immediately after defibrillation attempts and that rhythm and pulse checks be deferred until completion of 5 compression:ventilation cycles or minimally for 2min. However, data specifically confirming the post-shock duration of asystole or pulseless electrical activity before return...

BACKGROUND Most out-of-hospital ventricular fibrillation (VF) is prolonged (>5 minutes), and defibrillation from prolonged VF typically results in asystole or pulseless electrical activity. Recent visual epicardial observations in an open-chest, open-pericardium model of swine VF indicate that blood flows from the high-pressure arterial system to the lower-pressure venous system during untreate...

Myron L. Weisfeldt, MD The field of resuscitation science is characterized nearly uniformly by failed clinical trials: be it sodium bicarbonate, epinephrine at low or high dose, vasopressin, continuous or interrupted chest compressions, temperature management, antiarrhythmic drug use, or devices to augment perfusion, none has been shown convincingly to be of value. Nearly all of these large exp...