Large-scale study proves volunteer operated defibrillators are l...( 002. Dr Cappato who is Professor...),Health

Dr Cappato, who is Professor of Electrophysiology and Chief of the Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology Center in Milan, said: "Overall, we found that three out of a hundred patients in the prospective study survived to one year without any neurological problems, compared with under one out of a hundred of the earlier comparison group, even though the time from dispatching help to arriving with the patient was similar.

"There was an increase in survival for patients in both urban and rural areas, although it was significantly larger in the city than the countryside due to the shorter response time and larger number of defibrillators available. In the urban areas, survival rose from just under one and half persons per hundred in the earlier group to four per 100 in the study. In the rural areas it rose from one per two hundred in the earlier group to two and a half per hundred in the study. When you look at the relative gains though, as opposed to the absolute values, there was more benefit for the rural areas.

"However, there was a more than three times higher incidence of defibrillator teams being dispatched to CAs in urban areas (0.7 per 1,000 per year) than in the countryside (0.2 per 1,000 per year). This appears either to be mainly due to worse access in the country because of a higher incidence of CAs happening with no witnesses around, or a lower tendency for witnesses in rural areas to call out help."

For every quality adjusted life year (QALY)[3] saved during the study it cost less than 24,000 Euro (around 39,000 Euro during the start-up phase). The set-up costs were over one million Euro and the running costs once the system was established were around 681,000 Euro.

Dr Cappato said that the study had proved that defibrillators can easily and safely be exclusively operated by lay people. "This is an unprecedented finding and we hope that our study will serve as a benchmark for more systematic approaches in the future
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Contact: Margaret Willson
m.willson@mwcommunications.org.uk
44-153-677-2181
European Society of Cardiology
30-Nov-2005