When the heart suddenly and unexpectedly
stops beating. Blood stops flowing to the brain and other vital organs,
and without treatment, within minutes a person is typically dead.
But, a new study has suggested that sudden cardiac arrest isn't so sudden as half of sufferers experience warning signs hours, days, sometimes even weeks before cardiac arrest strikes, doctors at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles discovered.
But, a new study has suggested that sudden cardiac arrest isn't so sudden as half of sufferers experience warning signs hours, days, sometimes even weeks before cardiac arrest strikes, doctors at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles discovered.
However, most people ignore those symptoms – and miss a chance to save their own lives, according to the study.
‘There’s this window of opportunity that we didn’t really know existed.’
The study offers the possibility of one day preventing sudden cardiac arrest. Cardiac arrest kills nearly 350,000 people in the US alone each year.
Though it’s commonly confused with a heart attack, cardiac arrest is different – and much worse.
It causes the heart’s electrical activity to be knocked out of rhythm, abruptly stopping it from beating.
CPR can buy time before an ambulance arrives, but few patients survive, an action that is highly unlikely in a rural community like Nigeria.
As a result it’s been hard for the
medical community to tell whether cardiac arrest is a strike with little
or no advance warning.
