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May 12, 2021
Though they’re called resuscitated sudden cardiac arrests, many such events do not, in fact, have an underlying cardiac cause, which has implications for both patient care and clinical research, investigators have found.
Of patients who suffered an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) and survived long enough to be hospitalized in San Francisco County over a roughly 4-year span, most (69.1%) had an underlying arrhythmic cause, but a sizeable minority (27.1%) had noncardiac conditions to blame. Another 3.8% were classified as “nonarrhythmic/cardiac.”
The distinction mattered when it came to the likelihood of a patient surviving that initial hospital stay. The vast majority of survivors (92%) had an underlying arrhythmic cause, and only one had a noncardiac cause. The bulk of the noncardiac group was made up of patients with underlying neurologic conditions like stroke, intracranial hemorrhage, and seizure, all of whom died.