October 16, 2018

Restart a heart

By

I see from Twitter that it’s World Restart A Heart Day,  encouraging people to learn CPR. Which you should do. It’s not hard. Nowadays there are even Spotify playlists of songs with the right beat for chest compressions.

However, two statistical points:

  1. Even if you don’t know CPR, the nice people at the ambulance service (111 emergency number in NZ) can tell you what to do. This works well enough that there have been randomised trials (in the US) comparing the effectiveness of different sets of instructions
  2. The success rate of CPR in real life is not as high as on television. If you give someone CPR it’s quite likely not to work, and that won’t be your fault. The success rate of CPR is still higher than no CPR.
avatar

Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Ben Brooks

    Defining the success rate as ‘ever being well enough to be discharged’ the success rate of CPR in a hospital is 10-20%. Outside it would be much lower.

    Also, in surveys of what treatment they would want to refuse, around 90% of Drs say they would refuse CPR due to the low rate of success and high rate of serious side effects (e.g. being left in a vegetative state).

    So, while it’s true that the success of CPR is higher than no CPR, there’s good reason to think that the question of whether to receive it is more complicated and that if you wanted to dedicate some time to improving other people’s health, learning CPR is not a good use of your time

    6 years ago

  • avatar
    Megan Pledger

    It also depends on who you are around. I know a school teacher did CPR on a kid who got hit in the head with a cricket ball and saved him.

    6 years ago