EXPERTS from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia were among the leaders of two large national studies showing that extending CPR longer than previously thought useful saves lives in both children and adults. The research teams analyzed impact of duration of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in patients who suffered cardiac arrest while hospitalized.

“These findings about the duration of CPR are game-changing, and we hope these results will rapidly affect hospital practice,” said co-author Robert A. Berg, M.D., chief of Critical Care Medicine at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the American Heart Association’s Get With Guidelines-Resuscitation program (GWTG-R). That quality improvement program is the only national registry that tracks and analyzes resuscitation of patients after in-hospital cardiac arrests.

The investigators reported data from the GWTG-Resuscitation registry of CPR outcomes in thousands of North American hospital patients in two landmark studies – one in children, published today, the other in adults, published in October 2012. The pediatric study*, appears online today in Circulation, which analyzed hospital records of 3,419 children in the U.S. and Canada from 2000 through 2009. This study, whose first author was Renee I. Matos, M.D., M.P.H., a mentored young investigator, found that among children who suffered in-hospital cardiac arrest, more children than expected survived after prolonged CPR – defined as CPR lasting longer than 35 minutes; of those children who survived prolonged CPR, over 60 percent had good neurologic outcomes.

The conventional thinking has been that CPR is futile after 20 minutes, but Dr Berg said these results challenge that assumption.

Vinay M. Nadkarni, M.D., a co-author and critical care and resuscitation science specialist at CHOP, noted that illness categories affected outcomes, with children hospitalized for cardiac surgery having better survival and neurological outcomes than children in all other patient groups.

Adult study

The overall pediatric results paralleled those found in the adult study** of 64,000NIKE AIR MAX