Cardiocerebral Resuscitation: Hands-Only CPR
One of the major reasons contributing to dismal survival rates in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is the lack of bystander initiated cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Even though the majority of OHCA is witnessed, only 1 in 5 patients will receive bystander initiated CPR [1]. Survey studies have shown that bystanders are not wanting to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on strangers. Outside of early defibrillation, only early bystander initiated CPR has consistently been shown to improve neurologically intact survival in OHCA. So what about Cardiocerebral Resuscitation, also known as “Hands-Only” CPR? Read more →
Background: Left Bundle Branch Block (LBBB) on the ECG makes accurate recognition of ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction (STEMI) rather difficult. The 1996 and 2004 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) STEMI guidelines recommended immediate reperfusion therapy for patients with potentially ischemic symptoms and new, or presumed new, LBBB. In 2013, this recommendation was removed from the guidelines. Historically, reperfusion decisions in LBBB have been determined by the original Sgarbossa criteria published in 1996, but there are three key limitations to the original study by Sgarbossa et al:
Background: The traditional standard workup for ruling out subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) has been a non-contrast head CT and, if negative, a lumbar puncture. The thought behind this is that the sensitivity of head CT to rule out SAH is not 100% and declines over time and missing a SAH is potentially devastating. There has been a series of studies published in the past few years looking at the value of a negative head CT scan performed within 6 hours of headache onset in ruling out SAH. I have heard many say that if they have a negative Head CT at 6 hours or less in a neurologically intact patient they would not perform a lumbar puncture. 
Welcome to the December 2015 REBELCast, where Swami, Matt, and I are going to tackle a couple of topics in the world of Cardiology and Critical Care. First of all, we all know that the optimal treatment for STEMI is getting the patient to the cardiac catheterization lab, and time is muscle, but does it help to get patients to the catheterization lab even faster than 90 minutes? Or does speeding up the time have bad outcomes? Secondly, it has been drilled into our heads that high-quality CPR with minimal to no interruptions is key in OHCA. This gives our patients the best chance of neurologically intact survival. But a new study just published might beg to differ. So with that introduction today we are going to specifically tackle:
Background: As emergency providers we must be smarter than our ECG machines. Many times subtle findings on ECGs are not read by the machine, but we must be the experts at making the distinction between findings that require emergent treatment versus more benign etiologies. One specific set of diagnoses that can be very difficult to distinguish from each other is inferior STEMI vs Pericarditis. ECG experts discuss strategies such as looking at morphology of ST-segments (i.e. concavity or convexity), but this is not always accurate. Another, frustrating fact is that ST-elevation in the inferior leads (II, III, aVF) is typically seen with inferior STEMI and pericarditis. We therefore need a finding that has both a high sensitivity and specificity for MI. 
