Posted on 12/02/2013

People who escaped the immediate destruction caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake -- and resulting tsunami -- on March 11, 2011 were not out of the woods, as illustrated by significantly elevated rates of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the weeks following the disaster.

The epicenter of the earthquake -- which measured 9.0 on the Richter scale -- was off the northeast coast of Japan, and the brunt of the damage from the trembling and the surge of water was sustained by three prefectures -- Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima. In those areas, a total of 15,814 people died and another 2,664 went missing.

Previous research has identified a relationship between earthquakes and the risk of sudden cardiac arrest, and Taku Iwami, MD, PhD, of the Kyoto University Health Service in Japan, and colleagues wanted to find out whether a similar association was seen after the Japanese disaster.

As reported in the Nov. 28 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers looked at data from adult patients transferred to centers in the hardest hit prefectures after an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest from 4 weeks before to 8 weeks after March 11, 2011. They compared rates of cardiac arrest during each week with the expected rates for 2011 and the preceding 6 years.

The risk of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest was significantly elevated for the week following the earthquake (risk ratio 1.70) and for each of the 3 subsequent weeks (RRs 1.48, 1.47, and 1.26) before returning to the expected rate. No such deviations surrounding that date were seen in the previous six years.

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SOURCE: MedPage Today

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