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In the U.S., twice as many cardiac arrests occur in hospitals as out of hospitals. Expert guidelines advocate that defibrillation be delivered within 2 minutes of an in-hospital cardiac arrest. Prior studies of in-hospital arrest were limited by heterogeneity in rhythms and defibrillation protocols. The National Registry of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation uses standardized definitions and collects detailed reports about events from 369 participating hospitals. Using data from the registry, researchers examined the effect of delayed (>2 minutes) defibrillation in a cohort of 6789 inpatients who did not have implantable defibrillators.
The median time to defibrillation was 1 minute, but time to defibrillation exceeded 2 minutes in 30.1% of patie…