THURSDAY, Dec. 8, 2016 (HealthDay News) -- Cardiac arrest patients who receive epinephrine within five minutes are more likely to survive than those who don't receive the drug within that time frame, according to findings published online Dec. 1 in Circulation.
Researchers analyzed outcomes among 103,932 patients with cardiac arrest at 548 hospitals across the United States.
Survival rates were 12.9 percent among patients who received epinephrine within five minutes of cardiac arrest. This compared to 10.8 percent among those who received the drug after five minutes. The researchers also found that delays in receiving epinephrine led to poorer recovery in patients, and that hospitals that dealt with larger numbers of cardiac arrests tended to administer epinephrine sooner than those with fewer cases.
"Further studies are needed to determine if improving hospital performance on time to epinephrine administration, especially at hospitals with poor performance on this metric will lead to improved outcomes," the authors write.
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