Commentary on “Duration of Resuscitation Efforts and Survival After In-Hospital Cardiac Arrest: An Observational Study”

Decisions about the appropriate termination of resuscitation attempts are among the most important that teams must face, yet there have been very few studies looking into the issue. Many national guidelines refer only to advance decisions to prevent the initiation of resuscitation, such as DNAR orders,(1-3) and yet the decision to continue or abort on-going treatment is a clinical one, which should be evidence based like any other. This observational study(4) is one of the largest to examine the relationship between length of resuscitation efforts in hospital and outcome, and provides novel, powerful, and highly relevant results. The authors tested the hypothesis that hospitals with longer attempted duration of resuscitation in patients who don't survive would correlate with higher hospital survival outcomes, both immediate and to discharge. They assessed whether higher survival rates were associated with poor neurological status; additionally they directly estimated risk ratios for various at-risk groups, including breakdowns by cardiac rhythm. Hospital data was collected from 'Get With The Guidelines - Resuscitation'; the largest world-wide in-hospital resuscitation registry, managed by the American Heart Association.(5) Between 2000-2008, 64,339 cardiac arrests were considered that lasted at least 2 minutes (to exclude 'partial arrests') in 435 hospitals in the USA, each with a minimum experience of at least 10 arrests over 8 years. Exclusions were made for Emergency Departments, operating theatres, postoperative areas, procedure areas, rehabilitation areas, and arrests with area unknown, to avoid the 'distinct circumstances' of arrests in those settings. The median value for each hospital was calculated, and hospitals were divided into quartiles based on median length of resuscitation in non-survivors, with corresponding lengths of 16, 19, 22, and 25 minutes. Median resuscitation times overall were 17 minutes (IQR 10-26), with a breakdown of 12 minutes (IQR 6-21) for immediate survivors and 20 minutes (IQR 14-30) for non-survivors.(4).