KANSAS CITY, MO. — An estimated 750,000 hospitalized patients experience cardiac arrest and undergo CPR annually, and less than 30 percent of those leave the hospital alive. In a paper published in the Jan. 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers quantified the impact of receiving a life-saving electrical shock (defibrillation) among hospitalized patients experiencing a form of cardiac arrest known as ventricular arrhythmia. They found that the chances of survival for hospitalized patients improve dramatically if defibrillation is administered within the expert-recommended two minutes following a cardiac arrest.
