What you can do to get more public-access AEDs in your area.

1. Every time you walk into a store, ask them where the AED is. If they say "We don't have one" you can respond "Doesn't it make you nervous to work in a place that doesn't have one? It makes me nervous to shop someplace that doesn't have one." It will eventually make them think. 2. Call the… Read More

Virtual Ventricle: Computer Predicts Dangers of Arrhythmia Drugs Better than Animal Testing

This is really important. We now have a far faster, less-expensive, more-accurate way of telling whether a new drug will cause heart problems. Wow! By Larry Greenemeier | September 1, 2011 Researchers developed a computer model of a human heart to study whether certain drugs will help treat an… Read More

Toddler brought back after drowning.

associated press VANCOUVER, Wash. — Clark County firefighters say a 4-year-old girl nearly drowned at a popular swimming beach at Vancouver. Fire District 6 says a bystander spotted the girl face down in the water Monday evening at Klineline Pond in Salmon Creek Park. Witnesses started CPR until… Read More

We should all be ashamed that this sort of thing is still news, not the norm.

AMERICAN FALLS, Idaho — Quick-thinking coaches and a school's new defibrillator helped save the life of an American Falls High School athlete after the boy collapsed at practice. Superintendent Ron Bolinger said 17-year-old Ross Palmer, a star on the football team, collapsed near the end of… Read More

Nothing like evidence to set things straight.

The 2005 revisions to the BLS protocols stated that two minutes of CPR should precede defibrillation. A study published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that there was no difference in outcomes between two large groups: (a) those that had 30-60 seconds of CPR before… Read More

People Just Like You Are Saving Lives. Get Trained!

Seriously, folks. Ordinary people can keep a cardiac arrest victim's heart and brain alive long enough for a defibrillator to re-start the heart. It doesn't happen all the time, but why is it that 27 % of cardiac arrest survivors had their arrest in an airport? It's because there are lots of AED's… Read More

Defibrillator Used, Teen Saved.

OK, folks, this is the way it's supposed to work. You have a defibrillator at every sporting event and practice, and when someone dies of sudden cardiac arrest, you use it. It's not high tech. Do it. AMERICAN FALLS — Quick-thinking coaches and a school's new defibrillator helped save the life of… Read More

Hygienist's CPR saves heart-attack victim after wreck

By Terry Evans tevans@star-telegram.com Star-Telegram / Ron T. Ennis Dental hygienist Julie Watson looks over debris outside the dental clinic where she works on Bryant Irvin Road. Watson is credited with saving the life of a heart-attack victim who slammed his car into the clinic. FORT WORTH — A… Read More

There's a large problem with 'presenting rhythm' statistics.

Here's the deal... When you have a sudden cardiac arrest, your heart has already progressed from a perfusing rhythm to a non-perfusing rhythm. i.e., your heart is not pumping blood to your brain, and you are clinically dead. The tracking systems report the "initial rhythm" as whatever the rhythm… Read More

Some really interesting items in the CARES report

In no particular order, here are some punctuation marks from the CARES data for the past 4+ years. By way of background, there are two significant categories of heart rhythm: shockable and un-shockable. The first chance we have of learning what a cardiac arrest victim's heart rhythm is occurs when… Read More