By Helen Ouyang
Helen Ouyang is a physician and a contributing writer for the magazine.
March 27, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET
As an emergency doctor, I know that it's incredibly rare for standard resuscitation protocols including CPR to revive patients brought to the hospital in cardiac arrest. Even in that setting, with all the available staff, equipment and drugs, if patients have not been resuscitated successfully within 40 minutes from the moment they first collapsed, their chances of survival after that are essentially nil.
But patients with certain types of cardiac arrest who are treated with a new procedure, called ECPR, have a nearly 100 percent chance of being revived, with their brain function intact, if treatment is administered within 30 minutes of collapse. Even if the intervention is delivered after 40 minutes, there is still a 50 percent chance of revival. Survival rates after cardiac arrest have hardly improved in decades, so when I heard about these statistics from one program in Minnesota, I was very eager to visit it.
Here is what to know about ECPR and its availability.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/magazine/what-to-know-ecpr.html>
Helen Ouyang is a physician and a contributing writer for the magazine.
March 27, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET
As an emergency doctor, I know that it's incredibly rare for standard resuscitation protocols including CPR to revive patients brought to the hospital in cardiac arrest. Even in that setting, with all the available staff, equipment and drugs, if patients have not been resuscitated successfully within 40 minutes from the moment they first collapsed, their chances of survival after that are essentially nil.
But patients with certain types of cardiac arrest who are treated with a new procedure, called ECPR, have a nearly 100 percent chance of being revived, with their brain function intact, if treatment is administered within 30 minutes of collapse. Even if the intervention is delivered after 40 minutes, there is still a 50 percent chance of revival. Survival rates after cardiac arrest have hardly improved in decades, so when I heard about these statistics from one program in Minnesota, I was very eager to visit it.
Here is what to know about ECPR and its availability.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/magazine/what-to-know-ecpr.html>