November 14, 2006

Whites More Likely to Get CPR Help
(Reuters Health)

Whites with cardiac arrest are more likely to receive potentially life-saving resuscitation than are blacks, according to a study released on Tuesday.

The study's author, Robert O'Connor, director of education and research at the Christiana Care Health System, in Newark, Delaware, said the lack of training in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) among blacks is likely the reason for the disparity.

Out of 770 patients in Delaware who had a cardiac arrest away from a hospital in 2005, 45 percent of white victims received CPR to help revive them compared with 34 percent of the black victims, the study found.

"The most likely explanation is lack of access to training. I don't think it denotes any sort of cultural bias," O'Connor said in an interview.

The report also found blacks are less likely to perform CPR at home. The procedure involves chest compression and mouth-to-mouth breathing. Cardiac arrest, the loss of heart function and absence of a pulse, is usually caused by underlying heart disease or a heart attack.

The disparity in attempts of CPR at home between blacks and whites suggests the disparity in public places is largely due to training differences between the races, O'Connor said.

"I may be an idealist, but I thought there would be no difference between the two groups," he said.

The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association taking place this week in Chicago.

With no assistance, brain death starts to occur about 5 minutes after someone has a cardiac arrest, experts say, which makes CPR critical.

The AHA said no statistics exist on the exact number of cardiac arrests annually, but that 250,000 people a year die of coronary heart disease without being hospitalized, which may serve as a proxy.

"The public needs to understand that they are on their own for the first couple of minutes," O'Connor said.

The CPR was also likely to be more successful when performed on whites, the study said. The restoration of a pulse occurred in 30 percent of whites, compared with 17 percent of blacks, the study said.

Researchers used 2005 phone records to call centers run by the emergency medical system in Delaware. The race of the victim and whether a bystander attempted CPR was recorded. The race of the bystanders was not recorded.

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