Killer Weekends ? - A Cardiac Arrest on the Weekend Could Kill You
If you enter the hospital on Friday night through Sunday night, after cardiac arrest at home, you are more likely to die than people admitted on a regular weekday, researchers have found.
Researchers looked at a ten year period (representing more than sixty five thousand admissions to the hospital) and found that there was a fairly large increase in deaths if a cardiac arrest patient is admitted to the hospital on the weekend. A cardiac arrest is more than just a heart attack, it means that the heart was stopped-the patient was dead. If the heart stops for a long enough time other organs can die also. The brain is particularly sensitive to a lack of blood flow and four to six minutes without blood will cause brain death or severe damage. Restarting the heart is what emergency personnel strive to do when they respond to a cardiac arrest. Once an arrest patient has been admitted to the hospital, further supportive care takes place in an attempt to keep the patient alive.
The reason suggested for the increased death rate on weekends may be a lack of resources. It is stated in the study that factors such as age and pre-existing illness were accounted for by the analysis. There was no mention as to whether or not out of hospital weekend cardiac arrests were more likely to be caused by increased drug and alcohol use on weekends. Also, the weekends are a time when dangerous recreational activities tend to be pursued such as motorcycle riding or intoxicated driving.
Dr Richard M. Dubinsky from The University of Kansas Medical Center says hospitals should increase cardiac care specialty resources during weekends to reduce the chance of a poor result on the weekend days. This is of course easy to suggest but difficult to do because many hospitals do not have an adequate numbers of the highly trained expensive personnel to keep them in the hospital 168 hours per week. The financial cost to staff the hospital would be quite large (since these personel would be doing nothing the vast majoity of the time on weekends) and in these times reduced payment by insurance payors it may be a problem to fund his suggestion.
from the American Academy of Neurology 60th Anniversary Annual Meeting in Chicago, April 12–19, 2008.
