MOUTH-TO-MOUTH CPR STILL BEST FOR CHILDREN

The American Heart Association has recommended a "hands only" approach to CPR since 2008, emphasizing the importance of performing rapid chest compressions on victims of sudden cardiac arrest.
The group decided to nix the mouth-to-mouth portion of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in part because studies show that it doesn't improve overall survival and, in part, to increase the odds that a bystander would perform any kind of CPR at all.
But a new study finds that the old-fashioned version of CPR is more effective at resuscitating children in cardiac arrest.
Japanese researchers examined the medical records of 5,170 youths aged 17 and younger who were treated by emergency medical personnel for an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the years 2005, 2006 and 2007.
Unfortunately, only 9 per cent of those children survived, and even fewer -- 3 per cent -- had a "favourable neurological outcome."
But the ones who got CPR from a bystander stood a much better chance of preserving their neurological function than those who didn't -- 4.5 per cent vs. 1.9 per cent, according to a report published online yesterday by the journal Lancet.
The researchers also found that conventional CPR was more likely to result in a "favourable neurological outcome" than compression-only CPR.
In their analysis, 7.2 per cent of children given chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth had a good outcome, compared with 1.6 per cent of kids who got compressions only.
In a commentary accompanying the study, Spanish researchers say the reason is probably that most cases of sudden cardiac arrest in children -- 71 per cent in the Japanese study and more than 90 per cent in other studies -- are probably caused by noncardiac events.

In such cases, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is helpful.
Only about a third of cases in adults are thought to have noncardiac origins. When cardiac arrest has a cardiac cause, either type of CPR works equally well.
They conclude that bystanders should continue to provide traditional CPR to children in cardiac arrest.