Tools Help Save Cardiac Arrest Victim

For a guy who had a cardiac arrest, Steve Dunn got pretty lucky.

With his heart racing after an overambitious 2008 workout, he drove himself to a nearby hospital moments before losing consciousness. When he crashed in its parking lot, a nearby police officer was next to him within seconds. EMS personnel arrived and quickly got CPR started. And that Oshkosh (WI) Fire Department crew was that week trialing a combination of the ResQPOD impedance threshold device (ITD) and ResQPUMP active compression-decompression CPR (ACD-CPR) device, both now available from ZOLL.

Those are all key ingredients to improving cardiac resuscitation, and in this case they came together to help save Dunn, PhD, who was back teaching business at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh 10 days later.

“It was a sequence of events that led to me being saved,” Dunn says. “There were paramedics there, they got to me quickly, they happened to be testing the ResQCPR system, I happened to get it, and it worked as designed. I’m coming up now on eight years’ survival, so I feel incredibly lucky.”

The ResQPOD and ResQPUMP jointly constitute ZOLL’s ResQCPR system, which helps regulate pressure in the chest to enhance perfusion in states of low blood flow. The ResQPOD ITD enhances negative intrathoracic pressure by preventing the influx of unnecessary air through the open airway during chest wall recoil; the ResQPUMP allows the compressor to actively re-expand the chest with a suction cup to further enhance the negative pressure that helps refill the heart. In a clinical trial, use of the ResQCPR system increased one-year survival by 49% compared to patients who got conventional manual CPR.

Other data shows that using an ITD during ACD-CPR lowers intracranial pressure (thus improving cerebral perfusion pressure), increases blood flow to the brain and improves the likelihood of survival.

And, in fact, Dunn actually awoke during CPR. “They told me later I didn’t have a pulse or anything,” he says, “so of course they flipped out because they said they’d never had a guy who was basically dead talking to them.

“I attribute that to the ResQCPR system. Without it, I don’t know that I would have survived and been able to go back to work. Obviously, as a professor, I need my brain to work. So I’m completely convinced it played a large role in me being who I am today.”

For more, see www.zoll.com/ResQCPR.