Chest compressions: they really are important.

In 2005 and again in 2010, the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR) and the American Heart Association (AHA) Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiovascular Care were changed.

A primary change in the guidelines included increasing the proportion of time focusing on chest compressions by changing the ratio of chest compressions to ventilations from 15:2 to 30:2, and doubling the time between rhythm analyses. The changes being reported since implementation of this practice are refecting an increase in survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) for patients presenting with a shockable rhythm such as ventricular fbrillation (VF) and ventricular tachycardia (VT).

Less is known about the impact of the guidelines on the outcomes of non-shockable arrhythmias— asystole and pulseless electrical activity (PEA). Therefore, the authors performed a retrospective cohort study of all non-traumatic cardiac arrests due to a non-shockable rhythm over a 10 year period in King County, in the USA. The investigation compared a fve-year control period, using the 2000 resuscitation guidelines, to a fve-year intervention period, using the 2005 guidelines; with the primary outcome being survival at one year.