PHILADELPHIA--More than 200,000 people are treated for cardiac
arrest in United States hospitals each year, a rate that may be
on the rise. The findings are reported online this week in
Critical Care Medicine in a University of Pennsylvania Perelman
School of Medicine-led study. Though cardiac arrest is known to
be a chief contributor to in-hospital deaths, no uniform
reporting requirements exist across the nation, leaving experts
previously unable to calculate its true incidence and study
trends in cardiac arrest mortality and best practices in
resuscitation care. The authors, led by Raina M. Merchant, MD,
MS, an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine, used three
different approaches – involving the American Heart
Association's Get With the Guidelines data, a voluntary registry
of hospital resuscitation events –to estimate the total number
of treated cardiac arrests that take place in United States
hospitals each year. While some of these events occur among
terminally ill patients, the authors suggest tha