How does sudden cardiac arrest happen?
SCA occurs when the electrical system of the heart stops working properly due to an abnormal heart rhythm known as an arrhythmia. Heartbeats stop unexpectedly due to this. Heart attacks occur when coronary arteries are blocked, preventing blood from reaching the heart. SCAs do not occur when coronary arteries are blocked.
Symptoms of SCA include:
- fainting or loss of consciousness
- dizziness
- racing or irregular heartbeat
- chest pain
- shortness of breath
- nausea.
A person suffering a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is usually treated by calling emergency medical services and administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) until help arrives. Research shows that how quickly a person administers CPR has a direct impact on a person's survival and neurologic outcomesTrusted Source.
Primary care visits and SCA
Research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that people who experienced out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) in the weeks before their cardiac arrest were more likely to have visited their primary care doctor.
Almost 29,000 patients with OHCA were studied by the Danish Cardiac Arrest Registry Trusted Source. The percentage of patients meeting weekly with their general practitioner was constant before the OHCA, according to researchers.
Contrary to the general assumption, a sudden cardiac arrest does not strike entirely unheralded, as ESCAPE-NET data show that patients attend primary care more frequently in the run-up to an arrest than usual,” explains Dr. Han Tan, ESCAPE-NET project leader, and cardiologist at Amsterdam University Medical Centre AMC.
Dr. Tan says this insight might lead to increased efforts to prevent sudden cardiac arrest by identifying people at imminent risk. This study was also discussed with Dr. Alexandra Lajoie, a noninvasive cardiologist at Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, CA.
"My hope is that this research educates both patients and primary care providers because the fact that they're seeking care before a cardiac arrest is really unfortunate since somebody saw them and still didn't prevent it,” she said.
Dr. Lajoie said that the limited access to care may also contribute to these findings. “Patients may see their primary care doctor who is concerned about these symptoms appropriately and refers them to cardiology, but they can’t see a cardiologist or can’t have their echocardiogram or stress test due to limited access to care,” she detailed.
The differences between men and women with SCA
In the ESCAPE-NET study published in the European Heart Journal, women with OHCAs had a lower chance of being resuscitated than men.
In one Dutch province, researchers examined all resuscitation attempts treated by emergency medical services.
The study found that women with OHCA had a lower chance of receiving a resuscitation attempt by a bystander, even when the cardiac arrest was obvious.
Women with OCHA who were resuscitated also had a lower overall survival rate than men.
“This eye-opener must lead to public awareness campaigns aimed at narrowing the gender gap in sudden cardiac arrest management,” Dr. Tan says.
“A lot of that’s attributed to people being concerned about respect for female anatomy or just gender concerns,” Dr. Lajoie adds. “Someone who’s not well-trained may be concerned about doing deeper chest compressions on women who tend to have a smaller chest. And for effective CPR, you do need to give a good 2-inch deep chest compression.”
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