A study conducted by the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium has confirmed that certain antiarrhythmic medications, when administered by medical professionals, improved the survival rates of cardiac arrest patients who had failed electrical shock treatment.
Not all paramedics treat sudden cardiac arrest patients with antiarrhythmic drugs, because until now, there was no proven correlation between the drugs and the patients’ survival chances. The three-year study was published New England Journal of Medicine, and it affirms the theory that amiodarone and lidocaine, two commonly-used antiarrhythmic drugs, are effective for treating sudden cardiac arrest, even if only slightly.
Sudden Cardiac Arrest
Think of the heart as a metronome that keeps heartbeats in a steady rhythm. If the heartbeats ever lose that rhythm and become irregular, that’s called arrhythmia. There are a few types of arrhythmias – when the heart beats too fast, when it beats too slow, or when it’s completely and unpredictably out of sync. Some types can cause the heart to stop pumping blood to the rest of the body, and when that happens, it causes sudden cardiac arrest (SCA).
Sudden cardiac arrest is different than a heart attack. A heart attack is caused by blockage of the arteries. SCA, however, can occur in people who appear healthy and have no history of heart disease. More than 300,000 people are treated every year, and it is frequently fatal. Of the cases reported outside of hospitals, only 10% of sufferers survive.
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Antiarrhythmic Drugs
Irregular heartbeats are often treated with antiarrhythmic drugs – medicines that specialize in stabilizing the rhythm of the heart. They’re most frequently employed in out-of-hospital settings where defibrillation and other means aren’t immediately available.
The Three-Year Study
For three years, doctors studied patients from the time they were admitted to the hospital, through their stay, all the way to their discharge. Some patients were given amiodarone, others were given lidocaine, and others were issued a placebo.
The patients who were given the drugs survived 3-to-4% more frequently than those treated with placebos.
“This trial shows that amiodarone and lidocaine offer hope for bringing patients back to life and into the hospital after cardiac arrest,” said principal study author Peter Kudenchuk, M.D., a cardiac electrophysiologist at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. “While the overall increase in survival to hospital discharge of about 3% with amiodarone was not statistically significant, it came very close. Importantly, there was a significant improvement in survival to hospital discharge with either drug when the cardiac arrest was bystander-witnessed.”
That small number, 3%, doesn’t sound like a tremendous victory for medical science, but over the hundreds of thousands of cases of SCA, it can make a noticeable difference.
“I’m encouraged by the fact that though seemingly small, the 3-5% increase in survival reported in this trial means 1,800 additional lives could potentially be saved each year from cardiac arrest,” Dr. Kudenchuk added. “We can and should strive to improve our treatments for this all-to-common event. We believe this study is a significant step in that direction.”
