Opportunity to minimize harm
Discussant for the results during the presentation was Susanna Price, MBBS, PhD, Royal Brompton Hospital, London.
Dr. Price concluded: “What this means for me, is it gives me information that’s useful regarding the opportunity to minimize harm, which is a lot of what critical care is about, so we don’t necessarily now have to move these patients very acutely when they’ve just come in through the ED [emergency department]. It has implications for resource utilization, but also implications for mobilizing patients around the hospital during COVID-19.”
It’s also important to note that coronary angiography was still carried out in certain patients, “so we still have to have that dialogue with our interventional cardiologists for certain patients who may need to go to the cath lab, and what it should now allow us to do is give appropriate focus to how to manage these patients when they come in to the ED or to our ICUs [intensive care units],” she said.
Dr. Price added, though, that perhaps “the most important slide” in the presentation was that showing 90% of these patients had a witnessed cardiac arrest, “and yet a third of these patients, 168 of them, had no bystander CPR at all.”
She pointed to the “chain of survival” after cardiac arrest, of which Charles D. Deakin, MD, University Hospital Southampton (England), wrote that “not all links are equal.”
“Early recognition and calling for help, early CPR, early defibrillation where appropriate are very, very important, and we need to be addressing all of these, as well as what happens in the cath lab and after admission,” Dr. Price said.
This research was funded by the German Center for Cardiovascular Research. Dr. Desch and Dr. Price reported no relevant disclosures.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.