TUESDAY, July 5 (HealthDay News) -- Approximately 200,000 patients are treated for in-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA) annually in the United States, according to a study published online June 23 in Critical Care Medicine.
Raina M. Merchant, M.D., from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and colleagues estimated the event rate and temporal trends of adult resuscitated IHCA. The IHCA rates were calculated by three methods: IHCA rates from 433 hospitals in the Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation registry (GWTG-R) (2003 to 2007) were multiplied by the U.S. annual bed days; the GWTG-R IHCA rates were used to predict event rates for 5,445 acute care hospitals responding to the American Hospital Association survey; and use of weighted averages to calculate the national IHCA based on determining the average event rate for GWTG-R hospitals in acute care hospitals classified by academic, urban, and bed-size characteristics. Temporal trends were estimated from annual event rates.
The investigators found that the GWTG-R hospitals had mean adult treated IHCA event rates of 0.92/1,000 bed days. The IHCA event rate increased from 2003 to 2007 in 150 hospitals contributing data for all years of the study period. A total of 192,000 IHCAs were estimated to occur annually throughout the United States based on 2.09 million annual U.S. bed days. A total of 211,000 annual IHCAs were predicted after extrapolating GWTG-R hospitals to hospitals participating in the American Hospital Association survey. Based on weighted averages, 209,000 IHCAs were predicted annually in the United States.
"There are approximately 200,000 treated cardiac arrests among U.S. hospitalized patients annually, and this rate may be increasing," the authors write.
Several of the study authors disclosed financial relationships with the medical technology and health care industries.
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