Longer Resuscitation Attempts Increase Survival of Patients with Cardiac Arrest

Efforts to systematically increase the duration of resuscitation attempts could improve survival among patients who experience in-hospital cardiac arrests, according to the results of a study published in the October 2012 issue of theLancet. The study, which included 64,339 patients who had cardiac arrests at 435 U.S. hospitals from 2000 to 2008, found that, when compared with patients at hospitals with the shortest median resuscitation attempts in nonsurvivors (16 minutes), those at hospitals in the quartile with the longest attempts (25 minutes) had a higher likelihood of return of spontaneous circulation and survival to discharge.