12/30/2023
If you were asked during 2020 what disease is killing over 1000 people a day? Almost everyone would answer Covid-19. But ask anyone in any year prior to 2020 or after what disease kills over 1000 people a day and very few would have any idea.
The unknown pandemic is Sudden Cardiac Arrest. It is the biggest killer in the United States. Every year killing as nearly as many as Covid-19 did in 2020 but it is unknown, misunderstood and unlike Covid-19 there is no such thing as a vaccine that will help eradicate it.
Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) is often confused with and / or thought of as a heart attack. It is unrelated to heart attacks which have a comparatively low rate of fatality.
Heart Attacks can be compared to a plumbing problem within the heart. One or more of the pipes (vessels) gets blocked causing tissue damage that will be permanent as the heart is the only muscle in the human body that does not repair itself. The damage caused by heart attacks seldom causes immediate death but proper repair via surgery will hopefully prevent further heart attacks. People often have heart attacks and ignore signs and symptoms and therefore suffer several heart attacks before they go for help.
Because people often ignore the signs and symptoms of potential heart attacks the time it becomes life threatening is usually after a person has had several. This can occur over days, weeks, or even years. Society's lack of understanding of what to look for often results in heart attacks not being fixed timely enough, which is an all too routine process today. The symptoms of nausea, sweating, shortness of breath might be accompanied by discomfort in the chest, neck, shoulders, arms or abdomen. It would not be uncommon for people to not have the muscular discomfort as well. But people tend to convince themselves that they are not having a heart attack and delay any form of treatment. It's also not uncommon for people to experience any of the mentioned symptoms and perhaps in 20-30 minutes they will feel better. This often has them not get checked. That means they would not know if they had a heart attack but if they did there has been damage done to the heart. If it had not been repaired it will happen again and again until perhaps too much of the heart gets damaged, then perhaps resulting in death.
Heart Attacks are closely, albeit by no means entirely, due to unhealthy lifestyles such as being sedentary and/or eating poorly and ci******es smoking.
Cardiac Arrest, often mistakenly referred to as a heart attack is also known by the nickname, Sudden Death. There generally are no warning signs and the person, in an instant, collapses and will not be breathing. They are minimally clinically dead. Biological death would occur when the brain ceases to function.
This is, unlike the heart attack, due to a disruption of the heart's internal electrical system. Children, athletes and otherwise healthy people succumb to SCA.
The heart stops pumping blood and is just quivering from that changed electrical pulse. When that person collapses their brain will only be able to survive for generally 3 to 6 minutes off of the residual oxygenated blood from that last pump. Without immediate CPR they will be irreversibly dead within those 3 to 6 minutes. CPR has the ability to hopefully double or perhaps triple that window of time. Quality CPR keeps the blood containing oxygen flowing throughout the body with the brain the most important recipient.
This additional time is to provide a larger window of time until an AED (Automated External Defibrillator) can arrive. CPR has no capacity to help restart that heart. It can only be done via a shock from the AED. But when AED's arrive they all too often fail to save the person's life. That is all too often the result of CPR not having started early enough or not at all. The person's brain would then be dead and even if we do get the heart started they will need to be on life support and then that terrible decision faces the family. To "pull the plug or not pull the plug".
Only 10% of Cardiac Arrest victims survive in the United States. But we look at success stories like Seattle where there is a 62% survival rate. Getting virtually anyone who has a pair of hands to learn how to properly perform chest compressions is the only way we can increase the number of survivors from the #1 cause of death, Sudden Cardiac Arrest. Seattle has been progressively mandating CPR training in their High Schools for 41 years. They invented 911 dispatcher assisted CPR and you need to be CPR certified to get your initial driver's license.
Many resistances remain that keep people afraid to help in these emergencies. Let's look at the three top reasons people give for what prevents them from helping in almost any emergency. We'll also show you why those top three reasons are ill founded.
First, people state that they are uncomfortable in helping in these emergencies due to a fear of liability. That's a misnomer because there is ZERO liability when you volunteer your services to help in any first aid capacity. The Good Samaritan Law is more than 10 years older than CPR training and exists in all 50 states. In the history of the United States there has never been a successful lawsuit against anyone performing any first aid, including CPR, voluntarily.
The second biggest reason people give for unwillingness to help is fear of catching a disease. That can also be shown to be a misnomer because proper training teaches people to never do anything that might be harmful to them. Yet many people believe that if you learn CPR that you have to do it. That's wrong. Only do something if it is safe for you to do so. Doing chest compressions is usually safe to do unless bodily fluids are present on the chest. If you don't, for instance, have gloves don't do it unless the skin is clean, dry etc. Never do mouth to mouth unless it is someone you know well enough. Again, only do what is safe. Pumping the chest alone is often as viable as providing traditional high quality CPR which would be alternating 30 compressions with 2 breaths. The amount of oxygen in an adult's blood in the first several minutes of collapse allows "Hands Only" CPR to be as adequate as the traditional 30 compressions and 2 breaths.
The third biggest fear people have is that they could do something wrong and hurt the person. THEY ARE DEAD. You are hoping to bring them back to life (Resuscitate). You cannot hurt a dead person. An injury, should one occur, will only matter if you help get them alive. Injuries can then be fixed.
Improving training and getting more people to learn just how to do chest compressions is the key. Getting more AED'S in public places can then follow.
CPR certification, in itself, is unnecessary unless you have a job requirement for it. Yet learning CPR should be an objective for everyone. Reaching the levels that Seattle has reached in 40 years can eventually save over 250,000 people a year. Having learned CPR does not mean that the skill remains with you. To be prepared when that critical moment arrives takes review and practice. Currently the AHA is working on getting hospitals and EMS to do training every 3 months. Certification has traditionally been for 2 years but we are very aware that the skill set does not remain high for 2 years without intermittent review and practice.
Learning CPR is also something that most should realize requires more practice and training than once every 2 or so years. Many techniques for consistent and more frequent training need to be deployed. Not only in hospitals but businesses and other institutions need to develop drills, and refresher as studies show the skills learned in a class diminish fast when not practiced regularly.
Learn CPR...Become A Lifesaver
