• Tae Nyoung Chung, Jinkun Bae, Eui Chung Kim, Yun Kyung Cho, Je Sung You, Sung Wook Choi, and Ok Jun Kim.
• Department of Emergency Medicine, CHA University School of Medicine, Seongnam-Si, Gyeonggi-Do, Republic of Korea. hendrix74@gmail.com
• Emerg Med J. 2013 Jul 1;30(7):551-4.

ObjectivesRecent studies have shown that there may be an interaction between duty cycle and other factors related to the quality of chest compression. Duty cycle represents the fraction of compression phase. We aimed to investigate the effect of shorter compression phase on average chest compression depth during metronome-guided cardiopulmonary resuscitation.MethodsSenior medical students performed 12 sets of chest compressions following the guiding sounds, with three down-stroke patterns (normal, fast and very fast) and four rates (80, 100, 120 and 140 compressions/min) in random sequence. Repeated-measures analysis of variance was used to compare the average chest compression depth and duty cycle among the trials.ResultsThe average chest compression depth increased and the duty cycle decreased in a linear fashion as the down-stroke pattern shifted from normal to very fast (p<0.001 for both). Linear increase of average chest compression depth following the increase of the rate of chest compression was observed only with normal down-stroke pattern (p=0.004).ConclusionsInduction of a shorter compression phase is correlated with a deeper chest compression during metronome-guided cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

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