UA Sarver Heart Center makes a push for technique Every day,
approximately 1,000 Americans drop dead from cardiac arrest.
"When you think of it, that's a 9/11-attack every three days,"
said Katie Maass, director of communications and public
education for the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center.
"It's a problem." "That's the Tucson population in three years,"
agree UA medical student Karl Huebner said. Cardiopulmonary
resuscitation techniques have been used for decades, and
thousands of lives have been saved. But statistics show that one
in three bystanders will attempt CPR. Typically, a bystander is
unsure of CPR skills, afraid of hurting the victim, or afraid of
performing mouth-to-mouth, "partly because of the 'yuck'
factor," Maass said. Dr. Gordon Ewy, director of the Sarver
Heart Center, has a solution: compression-only CPR, sometimes
called hands-only CPR. Ewy has dedicated years of research to
the effects of CPR on cardiac arrest victims, the most common
cause of an adult sudden collapse. "When so