MONDAY, Nov. 11, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- You encounter someone collapsed on the sidewalk and quickly dial 911. Whether or not the operator instructs you on how to deliver cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) could mean life or death, especially if the victim is female, new research shows.
In a study involving nearly 2,400 emergency calls for cardiac arrest in North Carolina, rates for bystander CPR rose dramatically when the 911 operator helped guide the caller. Without such assistance CPR was performed just 11% of the time for male victims and 9% for female victims, but those rates climbed to 40% and 44%, respectively, when 911 callers got help from operators. “Prompt delivery of CPR doubles a patient's chance of survival from out of hospital cardiac arrest,” said study lead author Audrey Blewer , assistant professor of family medicine at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.
C. “What encourages me from a research standpoint is that there are so many opportunities to increase that number, and that’s really a matter of everybody working together and working towards the chain of survival from cardiac arrest,” Blewer said in a Duke news release. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Heart Association’s Resuscitation Science Symposium in Chicago.
Blewer and colleagues looked at data from a seven-year study of responses by bystanders and others to cardiac arrest. The effort is a collaboration between Duke Clinical Research Institute and othe.