Critical care medicine
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Critical care medicine · Oct 2007
Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative StudyDoes the prognosis of cardiac arrest differ in trauma patients?
It is proposed to not resuscitate trauma patients who have a cardiac arrest outside the hospital because they are assumed to have a dismal prognosis. Our aim was to compare the outcome of patients with traumatic or nontraumatic ("medical") out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. ⋯ The survival and neurologic outcome of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest were not different between trauma and medical patients. This result suggests that, under the supervision of senior physicians, active resuscitation after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is as important in trauma as in medical patients.