Mission & Aims
Center for Resuscitation Science in Stockholm Sweden is a research center at the Department of Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Solna Sweden. Our research center focuses mainly on research relating to sudden cardiac arrest, both out-of-hospital and in-hospital.
The Karolinska research group consists of mainly physicians and nurses and the majority of our research field focuses on treatments with the aim to improve survival after a cardiac arrest. Examples of some ongoing RCTs are:
- Prehospital intra arrest hypothermia treatment (PRINCESS-study),
- Dispatch of laypersons using a mobile application (SAMBA)
- Compression-only CPR vs. standard CPR (TANGO2).
Other research fields have a more epidemiological focus such as register-based data regarding changes in CPR-rates/survival over time.
In relation to the ESCAPE-NET network we will take part in the cardiac arrest case-cohort and bring resuscitation data from the Stockholm area. The aims are to measure the effect of different ‘first-responder’-systems, such as dispatch of laypersons using a mobile application and how of socioeconomic, demographic, and environmental factors affect both incidence and outcome after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.
Website
Relevant Publications
- Ringh M et al., Mobile-phone dispatch of laypersons for CPR in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. – N Engl J Med 2015; 372:2316-2325June 11, 2015 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1406038 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1406038
The dispatch of laypersons to sudden cardiac arrest has been shown to increase the bystander CPR-rates. To measure potential increase in survival there is always a problem of sufficient sample size. To date there is no study that has proven these applications successful in increasing survival.
- Wells DM, et al., Socioeconomic status and survival from ventricular fibrillation out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, Annals of Epidemiology (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annepidem.2016.04.001
The role of socioeconomic status in cardiac arrest has been studied before. There is however a lack of high quality data. One of the few studies that have used individual measures of socioeconomic status did only measure patients with ventricular fibrillation as primary rhythm in a single setting study. Another problem in studies focusing on the relationship between socioeconomic status and cardiac arrest is that the majority of studies are conducted in the United States. There is a lack of European studies.
- Fouche PF, Carlson JN, The importance of comorbidity and illness severity scores in cardiac arrest research – Resuscitation. 2016 May;102:e3. doi: 10.1016/j.resuscitation.2016.01.035. Epub 2016 Mar 17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.resuscitation.2016.01.035
It is just recently that comorbidity has been included as a prognostic factor in cardiac arrest research. The inclusion of data on comorbidity in cardiac arrest research could increase the quality of all cardiac arrest research and also tell us more about the presumed etiology of the cardiac arrest.