New CPR Guidelines Emphasize Compressions First

Don't fret about mouth-to-mouth. The average, untrained person can still save a life by focusing on chest compressions first, say new guidelines from the American Heart Association. The simplified form of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, focuses on giving chest compressions to keep the blood and the oxygen in the blood flowing to the heart and brain. The group's advice comes on the heels of studies in the past year trumpeting that a compression-only approach is as good or better than compression plus mouth-to-mouth. It updates guidelines from 2005.

"For a variety of reasons, when someone suddenly collapses in cardiac arrest, people often don't start any type of CPR, and one of the barriers, we believe, is that people think it's fairly complicated to do CPR," explained Dr. Michael Sayre, co-author of the new guidelines and chairman of the American Heart Association's emergency cardiovascular care committee. "But chest compressions alone are easy, and anyone can do it," he said. "Chest compressions actually act like an artificial heart, pumping blood to the heart and brain," Sayre noted. "And, that blood often will have a reserve of oxygen."

The American Heart Association recommends that if an adult is unresponsive and not breathing or is having occasional unusual breaths that sound like gasping, any bystander should first call 911 and then begin chest compressions. If someone else is nearby, send that person in search of an automatic external defibrillator, a device that can shock the heart back into normal rhythm. "To give the victim the best chance of survival, three actions must occur within the first moments of a cardiac arrest: activation of the EMS system, provision of CPR and operation of a defibrillator," the new guidelines state.

You have read this article American Heart Association / Blood / chest compressions / heart / oxygen / victim with the title oxygen. You can bookmark this page URL https://aganaktismenoi-volos.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-cpr-guidelines-emphasize.html. Thanks!

Quality of Care After Joint Surgery May Affect Heart Health

The quality of care a patient receives immediately after orthopedic surgery has a major impact on long-term heart health, a new study shows. A team of French researchers checked troponin levels in 378 patients for three days after they had orthopedic surgery, which includes procedures such as joint replacement. Troponin is a protein that's measured to determine whether physiologic stress related to surgery has caused damage to the heart. Dr. Sylvain Ausset, of Percy Military Hospital in Clamart, France, and colleagues focused on troponin levels to detect myocardial ischemia, which correlated with worse long-term cardiac outcomes.

The researchers then modified postoperative care to reduce events believed to lead to increased episodes of angina based on elevated troponin levels. Doing so lowered the incidence of cardiac problems months, and even years, later, they found.The methods used to improve quality of care included tighter control of oxygen and glucose levels in patients' blood, along with consistency and continuity of care as hospital staff monitored and cared for patients, according to the report published in the October issue of Anesthesiology.

"An improvement of quality of postoperative care results in a twofold decrease of postoperative myocardial ischemia and a fourfold decrease of major cardiac events later on," Ausset said in a news release from the American Society of Anesthesiologists. The findings could lead to new or improved clinical guidelines, according to an accompanying editorial written by Dr. Don Poldermans, of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

You have read this article Blood / heart / oxygen / surgery with the title oxygen. You can bookmark this page URL https://aganaktismenoi-volos.blogspot.com/2010/08/quality-of-care-after-joint-surgery-may.html. Thanks!