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Harvard Heart Letter | July 2008
Heart beat
Hands-only CPR
If you
see someone collapse and stop breathing, call 911 and then start
pushing hard and fast on the middle of the person’s chest, even if
you’ve never been trained to do cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
Don’t stop to give mouth-to-mouth breaths unless you want to and know
what you are doing. That’s the latest advice from the American Heart
Association, in an update of its 2005 guidelines on CPR (Circulation, April 22, 2008).
Receiving
bystander CPR more than doubles an individual’s chances of surviving a
cardiac arrest. Yet the majority of folks who collapse in front of
other people never get that help. Some bystanders hold off because they
worry they won’t do CPR right; others fear having to do mouth-to-mouth
breathing. In an effort to get more people to do CPR, the heart
association is giving the green light to hands-only CPR.
The
change makes sense. For people stricken by a cardiac arrest,
compressing the chest is just as good as alternating chest compressions
with mouth-to-mouth breathing. That’s because their blood is generally
full of oxygen.
The compression-only approach works only
for people suffering a cardiac arrest. If someone stops breathing
because he or she has been under water, choked on food, or had a severe
asthma attack, they need mouth-to-mouth breathing as well as chest
compressions.
If someone suddenly collapses and stops breathing, odds are he or she is having a cardiac arrest. Here’s how you can help:
Call
911, or have someone else do it. Send someone to find a defibrillator.
Place both of your hands, one on top of the other, over the middle of
the person’s chest. Press hard and release. Repeat, aiming for 100
presses a minute. Don’t stop if the person seems to gasp or move. Keep
pressing until an emergency team arrives or someone comes with a
defibrillator. If other people are with you, try to trade off every
couple of minutes so you don’t get tired and give weak compressions.
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