New Validated Data Suggest You Should Update Your Approach to CPR

You probably learned how to administer CPR before you even entered med school. It’s not exactly a complex medical procedure, after all. It’s so simple, in fact, that very little clinical research has gone into assessing whether there’s a better, more effective way to do it—until now. The National Institutes of Health Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium tested various combinations of chest compression frequency and chest compression depth to assess the optimal method. The research took into account the cases of more than 3,600 patients treated by 150 EMS agencies in the U.S. and Canada who experienced cardiac arrest outside of a hospital environment. Using a CPR device called the impedance threshold device, they found the most efficient combination to be roughly 107 compressions per minute at a compression depth of 4.7 cm in the first 5 minutes of CPR. When CPR was performed within 20 percent of those values, neurologically intact survival rose from 4.3 percent to 6 percent. The findings were published recently in JAMA Cardiology.