What is cardiac arrest all about?

Cardiac arrest is an extreme and sudden medical emergency where the heart stops functioning and there is an unexpected loss of breathing and consciousness.

Cardiac arrest and heart attack are most often confused to be the same but they are not. Heart attack is a result of blockage of the blood flow of the main blood vessel (coronary artery) which supplies blood to the heart. Whereas a heart attack can cause a cardiac arrest in which the patient will not be able to breathe and as a sufficient amount of oxygen will not be provided to the body and mainly the brain will not function properly because of which the patient also undergoes a brain stroke which can make the patient go unconscious.

Cardiac arrest can be caused by-

• Personal or family history of forms of heart disease
• Smoking
• High blood pressure
• High blood cholesterol
• Obesity
• Diabetes
• A sedentary lifestyle
• Drinking
• Increasing Age
• Males – two to three times more likely to experience sudden cardiac arrest
• Drug abuse of cocaine or amphetamines
• Nutritional imbalance of low potassium or magnesium levels

Cardiac arrest symptoms come without any warning these can be-

-Sudden collapse

-No pulse

-No breathing

-Loss of consciousness

-Weakness

-Chest pain

How can we treat a person after a cardiac arrest-

• Call 911 or the emergency number in your area. If you have immediate access to a telephone, call before beginning CPR.
• Perform CPR- Quickly check the breathing. If the person isn’t breathing normally, begin CPR. Push hard and fast on the person’s chest — at the rate of 100 to 120 compressions a minute. If you’ve been trained in CPR, check the person’s airway and deliver rescue breaths after every 30 compressions.

• CPR – cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is critical to treating sudden cardiac arrest.-A CPR helps the heart to get back to its pace and starts beating again providing the blood to the body which helps to provide the organ’s with an adequate amount of oxygen

• Defibrillation-
  Defibrillation is a treatment for cardiac arrests A defibrillator is a machine which delivers a dose of electric current (often called a countershock) to the heart.

  • -Defibelater

• Long-term treatment of medications, implantation of cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) and surgery like coronary angioplasty, coronary bypass surgery, radiofrequency catheter ablation or corrective heart surgery.

Impliation of using transplantation to treat cardiac arrest.-

To treat cardiac arrest transplantation can take place in which the patient’s heart is exchanged with a healthy heart and which pumps blood along with oxygen to the whole body again. 

There are several implications of cardiac arrest some of them are-

Ethical-Many ethnicities believe that taking an organ from a dead person disfigures the person’s body and does not give rest to the dead person

Economical/Social-As transplantation is a very expensive process and also requires maintenance of organ, only the upper-middle-class people and higher class people will only be able to afford the transplant which increases the gap between the rich and poor.

Political-The main political impact is organ trafficking, organ trafficking is kind of an organ smuggling in which organ’s from poor and rich countries are smuggled but mainly from poor countries to rich countries so that doctor’s earn more money in the cointry.