Advanced Circulatory Systems announced results from a large, National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded clinical trial comparing standard cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to a new method of CPR that provides greater protection to the heart and brain when the heart stops beating. The new system called ResQCPR combines an active compression decompression CPR (ACD-CPR) device, called the ResQPump, and an impedance threshold device (ITD), called the ResQPOD.
Additional results from the ResQTrial study have now demonstrated that when the ResQCPR system was used together with therapeutic hypothermia, there was a six-fold increase in the percentage of patients who improved from poor neurologic function at hospital discharge to good neurologic function at 90 days, when compared to standard CPR with hypothermia.
“The striking improvement in patients treated with the ResQCPR system and hypothermia demonstrates the important synergy between the two technologies. These findings provide a new way to significantly decrease the number of patients with poor long-term neurological function, especially when the ResQCPR system is applied early during cardiac arrest,” said Marvin Wayne, medical director of Whatcom County in Washington, USA, and principal author of the study.
The ResQTrial study evaluated over 5,000 patients in seven different US emergency medical services systems to determine the effect of the ResQCPR system on rates of long-term survival with good brain function. The new findings from the study focus on the subset of patients with poor brain function (neurologic outcomes) at the time of hospital discharge. Poor neurological function for survivors after cardiac arrest is an enormous burden for families, patients, and society due to the high health care costs associated with caring for them.
Marvin Wayne and colleagues compared long-term neurologic outcomes for those survivors who were treated in one of four ways: 1) standard CPR with no therapeutic hypothermia, 2) standard CPR with therapeutic hypothermia, 3) the ResQCPR system with no therapeutic hypothermia, or 4) the ResQCPR system with therapeutic hypothermia.
Previous studies have demonstrated that the ResQCPR system triples blood flow to the heart and brain when applied early in the treatment of cardiac arrest. Primary results from the ResQTrial, published earlier this year in The Lancet, demonstrated that use of the ResQPOD and ResQPump combination resulted in a greater than 50% increase in the number of patients who survived to hospital discharge with favorable neurological function compared with those treated with standard CPR. The 50% survival benefit was observed up to a year after cardiac arrest.
These new results from the ResQTrial study will be presented at the American Heart Association in November 2011. The company has applied to the FDA to obtain approval of the ResQCPR System in the United States and hopes it will be widely available for patient care in the near future.
