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Efficacy of external cardiac compression in a dental chair

2008; Elsevier BV; Volume: 79; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.resuscitation.2008.06.021

1873-1570

Takeshi Yokoyama, Kazu-ichi Yoshida, Kunio Suwa,

Cardiovascular and Diving-Related Complications

As anesthesiologists who take special interest in dental services, we will ask your attention how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), when we have sudden cardiac arrest with a patient in a dental chair. Should we do it in the dental chair, or should we move the patient down to the floor or to some other place? There are several case reports of successful resuscitation.1Chapman P.J. Penkeyman H.W. Successful defibrillation of a dental patient in cardiac arrest.Aust Dent J. 2002; 47: 176-177Crossref PubMed Scopus (10) Google Scholar, 2Hunter P.L. Cardiac arrest in the dental surgery.Br Dent J. 1991; 170: 284Crossref PubMed Scopus (11) Google Scholar, 3Absi E.G. A cardiac arrest in the dental chair.Br Dent J. 1987; 163: 199-200Crossref PubMed Scopus (13) Google Scholar However, few reports described about the efficacy of external cardiac compression (ECC) in a dental chair performed by staffs of dental office. Usually, dental chairs are fixed firmly on the floor, thus we may perform ECC in the dental chair immediately if we know it to be effective. We, therefore, investigated the efficacy of ECC in the dental chair. Ten dental hygienists participated in this study. They are all female, 26 ± 4 year-old, 159 ± 4 cm and 50 ± 3 kg. They performed ECC for 2 min on the resuscitation manikin, the Laerdal Resusci® Anne (Laerdal Medical AS, Norway), in two different situations; on the floor and in the dental chair (Spaceline Emcia, J. Morita Mfg. Corp., Japan). The efficacy of ECC was evaluated by the average depth and the percentage of correct ECC with adequate depth (38–51 mm), which were assessed using Laerdal PC SkillReporter® (Laerdal Medical AS, Norway). The average depth and the percentage of correct ECC were 34.8 ± 7.2 mm and 37.8 ± 39.8% in the dental chair, and 36.6 ± 5.9 mm and 49.7 ± 42.1% on the floor. Both values in the dental chair were higher than those on the floor, although it did not reach statistical significance. From these data, we may safely argue that ECC done in the dental chair may be at least as effective as that done on the floor. Considering the difficulty of moving patients to the floor and the time required to this transfer, we are inclined to insist that we should perform CPR in the dental chair for dental emergency. None.