Who gets CPR?
Residents living in high-income white and high-income integrated neighborhoods were more likely to receive bystander CPR during an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest than arrest victims in low-income black neighborhoods, according to a publication in the Oct. 25 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Arrest victims in low-income white, low-income integrated, and high-income black neighborhoods were also less likely to receive bystander CPR.
In an effort to look at future CPR training processes, researchers from Emory University, the University of Colorado, and several other institutions wanted to better understand the effects of different neighborhoods on the probability of receiving bystander CPR in out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. More than 300,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occur in the United States each year.
Using surveillance data submitted from 29 U.S. sites to the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES), the researchers looked at data from 2005 through 2009. Out of 14,225 usable cardiac arrests registered in CARES, bystander CPR was provided to 4,068 patients.
The CARES program was developed by Emory's Department of Emergency Medicine and has been funded by the Centers for Disease Control for the past eight years.
