What is the New Procedure Introduced to Protect Heart Attack Victims?

Return the heart at all costs

The purpose of the DSED? Improve the survival rate of infarction victims. To do this, this procedure intends to modify the basic emergency intervention strategy. A revolution, because the survival of a cardiac arrest depends greatly on the resuscitation technique, if it is effective or not.

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A heart that works normally is crossed by regular electric pulses. When these impulses become too weak or not coordinated enough, they can stop completely, creating the cardiac arrest. This is why defibrillation is the basic resuscitation technique. A powerful electric shock would restore the rhythm of the heart, regulate it, or do it again.

Professional tests

However, 20% of patients may not respond favorably to this defibrillation technique “standard”, In particular when the cause of their infarction is linked to an abnormal activity of the cardiac ventricles. This is where the DSED procedure comes into play, since it will provide rapid regular shocks with two defibrillators.

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The tests are at least encouraging. According to tests in Canada, this procedure could multiply by two the chances of survival of victims who do not respond favorably to standard defibrillation. The electric current would travel along a path closer to the left ventricle of the muscle organ. Out of 261 patients, 30.4% of them who went through this technique survived, against 13.3% with the basic resuscitation process.

Although the tests are rather convincing, the results are to be qualified. Indeed, planned tests had to be postponed because of the pandemic. Those made by Canada are the first to compare DSED with standard defibrillation.

Sources: The Conversation, Science Alert