From The New Yorker:
Jon Marinaro, an emergency physician and intensivist at the University of New Mexico, is pushing the use of ecmo further. Every year, nearly four hundred thousand Americans suffer cardiac arrest outside of a hospital. Despite the use of CPR, defibrillators, and powerful drugs, fewer than one in ten survive. “That’s where ecmo comes in,” Marinaro told me. In a small room crowded with ecmo pumps, next to his hospital’s pediatric I.C.U., Marinaro showed me how to place an ecmo tube, or cannula, on a model he’d built out of white PVC pipe. Hand-drawn thank-you cards from a class of first graders were tacked to a cabinet behind him: Marinaro and his team had saved their teacher with ecmo. “If you can do better than CPR, you’re going to save more lives,” he said.
In France, emergency responders have been using ecmo to treat cardiac arrest since 2011, placing patients with heart attacks onto the machines, whether in the Louvre or on the subway. In 2014, Demetris Yannopoulos, a cardiologist at the University of Minnesota, started a similar program in Minneapolis. What he found surprised him. “We could save almost half” of the patients, he told me. He paused. “I wasn’t expecting that kind of survival.” In a randomized study of cardiac-arrest patients, he found that forty-three per cent of those treated with ecmo and CPR survived; with CPR only, only six per cent did.
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