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Thursday, March 15, 2007Forget mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When somebody collapses in cardiac arrest, experts now say, bystanders should not bother breathing into his or her mouth, once considered a key component of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. "Rescue breathing is an oxymoron," says Gordon Ewy of the University of Arizona College of Medicine. "We've been doing it wrong for 40 years." The landmark study, by Ken Nagao and colleagues at Surugadai Nihon University Hospital in Tokyo, found that twice as many of 4,241 cardiac arrest victims who collapsed in front of others survived with good brain function if they got compressions only without mouth-to-mouth breathing. But wait, maybe rescue breathing isn't always an oxymoron: Experts say rescue breathing should still be taught because it is still important for subsets of cardiac-arrest victims, including whose who drown, choke or overdose. It is also vital for children whose arrests are more likely to be respiratory in nature than cardiac. posted by Sydney on 3/15/2007 10:29:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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