Researchers saw a nearly 50 percent improvement in the number of students willing to perform CPR.
ST. PETERSBURG, FL--The mouth-to-mouth part of performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, has long been the focus of jokes on television and in movies. But when instructors in a study with high school freshmen taught hands-only CPR, students reported they were more likely to provide life-saving help to somebody having a heart attack.
The survival rate for people who have (sudden cardiac arrest) outside a hospital and do not receive CPR is less than 10 percent, which researchers said motivated the hands-only concept in the hope it will increase the number of people who get help from bystanders.
"We saw confidence build in the teenagers' eyes, body language, and knowledge during training of this critical skill," said Dr. Elena Rueda-de-Leon, also a pediatric resident at All Children's Hospital Johns Hopkins Medicine, in a press release. "If CPR hands-only training became part of every school curriculum, we could see an exponential number of life-saving hands available at the drop of a heartbeat."
Researchers in the study, which is being presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics national conference, showed students at eight schools in the Tampa, Fla., area a traditional training video and provided hands-on training with manikins for doing compression-only CPR.
Before the class, 47 percent of students said they would be performing CPR on a random person they saw having a heart attack. After the training, however, the students were significantly more confident in their ability to perform CPR and nearly 75 percent said they would be willing to do so -- a large improvement.
Just under half of all cardiac deaths occur outside a hospital, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and people who have heart attacks outside a hospital and do not receive CPR survive less than 10 percent of the time. This, researchers said, means finding ways to encourage people to perform life-saving techniques if they see a person in distress.
"This grim statistic may drastically improve to greater than 60 percent with the addition of immediate CPR," said Dr. Jacquelyn Crews, a pediatric resident at All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg. "Hands-only CPR is an effective way to teach large groups of people effective lifesaving skills and increase their willingness to use them if they witness a cardiac arrest."
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SOURCE: Stephen Feller, UPI