Mayo Clinic CPR efforts successful on man with no pulse for 96 minutes
Monday, May 2, 2011 - 11:20
in Health & Medicine
By all counts, the 54-year-old man who collapsed on a recent winter night in rural Minnesota would likely have died. He'd suffered a heart attack, and even though he was given continuous CPR and a series of shocks with a defibrillator, the man was without a pulse for 96 minutes. But this particular instance of cardiac arrest, reported first in Mayo Clinic Proceedings online, turned out to be highly unusual: "The patient made a complete recovery following prolonged pulselessness," says anesthesiologist and cardiac care specialist Roger White, M.D., lead author of the article.