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The 2015 American Heart Association Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support guidelines deemphasize advanced airway placement as a component of initial resuscitation. Out-of-hospital–arrest data suggest lower survival among patients who are intubated in the field (NEJM JW Emerg Med Feb 2013 and JAMA 2013; 309:257). To determine whether this applies to inpatients, investigators examined resuscitations of more than 108,000 patients in a U.S. registry.
Seventy percent of patients were intubated during their code events; most (95%) of these intubations occurred within 15 minutes of resuscitation. Patients with initial nonshockable rhythms (i.e., pulseless electrical activity [PEA] or asystole) were more likely to be intubated than were those with ve…