Soccer player Fabrice Muamba alive and talking after cardiac arrest that left him dead for 78 minutes
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Could everyday folks get the kind of intensive resuscitation efforts that Fabrice Muamba, a soccer player whose heart stopped beating for 78 minutes?
The 23-year-old pro-athlete’s cardiac arrest and his subsequent revival during a British soccer match generated international headlines this week. Muamba was described as being “in effect dead” by the team doctor.
Doctors applied life-saving measures such as chest compressions and 15 defibrillator shocks during the 48 minutes to get Muamba to the hospital and an additional 30 minutes at the hospital. Muamba remains at a hospital in London and has been talking.
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Muamba’s circumstances were highly unusual since he collapsed publicly in the middle of the soccer game where there were doctors on sidelines who immediately came to his side.
“It helped that it happened in a public setting. At their home, the response would’ve been much slower,” Abella said.
Life-saving techniques, such as CPR and cooling a patient's body called therapeutic hypothermia are blurring the line between life and death.
“What used to be an on-or-off thing, it’s becoming a gray area,” he said. “You can be mostly dead. You can be restored back to health and life, so that’s becoming hard to define.”
Typically, doctors view about 20 to 30 minutes as the limits for survival, although some resuscitation efforts have continued for over an hour, Abella said. Muamba’s survival is a testament that the first-responders on the soccer field “did a fantastic job of CPR and defibrillation.”
More here: Would you get the care Muamba did? – - CNN.com Blogs
