OBJECTIVE Few data are available on traumatic cardiopulmonary arrest in children. Efforts at resuscitation typically result in heavy utilization of finite resources with little understanding of which characteristics, if any, may be associated with success. The objectives of this study were to describe the outcome of children in traumatic cardiac arrest and to identify patients for whom aggressi...

Care by Gräsner and colleagues that strongly emphasizes the importance of encouraging attempts at cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in cardiac arrest caused by severe trauma [1]. Despite the interesting content, in our opinion the results presented by Gräsner and colleagues suff er by being derived from databases designed for diff erent purposes (Cardiac Arrest Registry and Trauma Registry). ...

BACKGROUND Traumatic hemopericardium remains a rare entity; it does however commonly cause cardiac tamponade which remains a major cause of death in traumatic blunt cardiac injury. OBJECTIVES We present a case of blunt chest trauma complicated by cardiac tamponade causing cardiac chamber equalization revealed by reflux of contrast. CASE REPORT A 29-year-old unidentified male suffered blunt ...

INTRODUCTION Many consider attempted resuscitation for traumatic out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) futile. This study aims to describe the characteristics and profile of paediatric traumatic OHCA. METHODS The Victorian Ambulance Cardiac Arrest Registry (VACAR) was used to identify all trauma related cases of OHCA in patients aged less than 16 years of age. Cases were linked with their cor...

Introduction: Cardiac arrest following trauma occurs infrequently compared with cardiac aetiology. Within the German Resuscitation Registry a traumatic cause is documented in about 3% of cardiac arrest patients. Regarding the national Trauma Registry, only a few of these trauma patients with cardiac arrest survive. The aim of the present study was to analyze the outcome of cardiopulmonary resus...

Survival rates following traumatic cardiac arrest (TCA) are known to be poor from both civilian and military data [1,2]. However, the common misconception that resuscitation is futile for all patients is not well founded. Lockey and colleagues demonstrated that a well-trained physician and paramedic team attending out-of-hospital TCAs could achieve a 7.5% survival rate to hospital discharge, co...

BACKGROUND Survival after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is closely linked to the quality of CPR, but in real life, resuscitation during prehospital care and ambulance transport is often suboptimal. Mechanical chest compression devices deliver consistent chest compressions, are not prone to fatigue and could potentially overcome some of the limitations of manual chest compression. However, ther...

objective: to develop decision-support tools to identify patients experiencing sudden cardiac arrest (sca). methods: eighty calls related to sca were content analyzed, and the contextual patterns that emerged were organized into a checklist. two researchers independently analyzed the recorded calls and compared their findings. eighteen dispatchers scored 20 cases (which included sca and non-sca...