Cardiac "Re-arrest" Increases Mortality Rates

Patients who experience “re-arrest”, or those that are resuscitated through CPR, then lose their pulse again before reaching the emergency department, have a greater in-hospital mortality rate, researchers reported.

The odds were greater than six-fold for those who had unresolved pre-hospital re-arrest after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, according to case data from the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium and David Salcido, MPH, of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania, and colleagues. 

Researchers analyzed data on 11,456 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests cases from 2006 to 2008 with mean age 63.7 years and compared those with unresolved re-arrest to those without.

Those with re-arrest were less likely to present with a first ventricular fibrillation, and more likely to undergo shock and to have received epinephrine. 

"This is largely an unstudied phenomenon and we're really kind of the first people to shine a light on it, so hopefully ... we can get more people to pay attention to it," researchers said.

-Michael Potts