You’ve probably seen it happen at some point, maybe on TV: an athlete suddenly collapses on the field, and everyone freezes. That’s sudden cardiac arrest, and it’s the leading medical cause of death in young athletes.
In the US, somewhere around 350,000 to 420,000 people have a cardiac arrest outside a hospital every year, and about 90% of them don’t make it. The heart just stops, and within minutes the brain starts running out of oxygen. But getting CPR going and using an AED (those portable defibrillators on the wall in a lot of schools and gyms) can triple someone’s chance of survival.
A study led by UW Medicine looked at 132 young athletes, average age 16, who went into cardiac arrest. Overall, 48% survived, which is already way better than the general rate. But when an AED was on-site and used, 89% survived. The catch is that people only start CPR about 40% of the time, usually because they are scared they’ll mess it up.
Here’s the thing though: CPR is a skill you can actually learn. Lots of schools offer training, and hands-only CPR is basically push hard and fast in the center of the chest until help arrives.
I think every person should know where the nearest AED is and how to do CPR. It’s one of the few times where a teenager can make a difference between someone living and dying.
