Bystanders are less likely than males to provide life-saving CPR to women experiencing a cardiac arrest in public, resulting in more women dying from the frequent health emergency, according to a study published Monday.
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is a technique that combines mouth-to-mouth breathing and chest compressions to pump blood to the brains of patients whose hearts have stopped beating, perhaps preventing death until medical aid comes.
A team of Canadian doctors wanted to discover how bystanders perform the treatment differently to men and women in research that will be presented at a medical conference in Spain this week but has not yet been peer-reviewed.
They examined data from over 40,000 cardiac arrests that occurred outside of hospitals in the United States and Canada between 2005 and 2015.
According to the study, 54% of the patients got CPR from a bystander.
In the case of a cardiac arrest in a public setting, such as the street, 61% of women received CPR from a bystander, compared to 68% of males.
According to Alexis Cournoyer, an emergency physician at the Hopital du Sacre-Coeur de Montreal who led the study, this disparity “increases women’s mortality following a cardiac arrest — that’s for sure.”
According to the American Heart Association, cardiac arrests are a primary cause of mortality, with over 350,000 happening in the United States alone each year.
According to studies, only around 10% of persons who experience a sudden cardiac arrest outside of a hospital survive.
The researchers were looking for a rationale for the gender disparity.
According to Cournoyer, one notion was that people in public could be uncomfortable caressing a woman’s breast without her agreement.
He noted that the team investigated if age may have a factor.