Online CPR Certification Blog

When giving their research findings, the researchers also said that some had a high risk of suffering broken bones than others. The study was conducted on people who had been admitted to hospitals in Korea and nearly a third of resuscitated people had at least one of their ribs broken and around 4% of them had a bone that was broken in the process.

According to Dr. Michael Sayre who is the spokesperson for American Heart Association and also a professor at University of Washington based in Seattle, it is expected that the patient will suffer from a broken rib when a CPR is being done as this shouldn’t be a reason of worrying as people must continue helping those who experience a cardiac arrest. He continued to say that even though he has talked to many cardiac arrest survivors, he has never come across someone who wished that they never got the CPR as their chest now hurts. Michael was however not involved in this study.

Statistics of those with injuries

Dr. Min Joung Kim of Yonseu University College of Medicine, Seoul led the researchers in conducting the new study. They did CT scans on patients taken to eight emergency departments from January to June 2011. All of them had received a successful CPR either in the ED or before they got to the hospital. Out of the 71 patients who were scanned, researchers found that twenty two of them had one broken rib while 14 of them had multiple breaks. Of them, just three patients had their bones broken. This is the cartilage plate connecting the ribs. Some of them had suffered various other injuries apart from broken bones like bruised lungs and a chest wall blood clot.

The high risk groups

The researchers found that generally, age wasn’t a factor in determination of those with a high likelihood of suffering fractures. However, women and also people who got CPR from someone else rather than a doctor had high chances of ending up with broken ribs. For patients with compressions that were not performed at the hospital like a quarter of the patients who had their CPR done by a paramedic suffered rib fractures in comparison to a third of those who got CPR from a lay person.

Among the patients who got CPR at the hospital, a third of them who got CPR by a doctor suffered fractures the same case with about half of those who got compressions from other people rather than a doctor. In total, nearly a half of women and close to a quarter of men involved in the study suffered rib fractures. The likelihood of women having broken ribs/ bones after CPR is highly mostly because they are more likely to be suffering from osteoporosis, a bone thinning disease.