Continued breathing followed by gasping or apnea in a swine model of ventricular fibrillation cardiac arrest
Affiliation
University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center, Tucson, AZ, USADepartment of Anesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine, University Hospital Basel, Basel, Switzerland
Department of Medicine, University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, AZ, USA
Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, AZ, USA
Department of Anesthesiology, University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, AZ, USA
Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Issue Date
2010
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BioMed CentralCitation
Zuercher et al. BMC Cardiovascular Disorders 2010, 10:36 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2261/10/36Journal
BMC Cardiovascular DisordersRights
© 2010 Zuercher et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0).Collection Information
This item is part of the UA Faculty Publications collection. For more information this item or other items in the UA Campus Repository, contact the University of Arizona Libraries at repository@u.library.arizona.edu.Abstract
BACKGROUND:Continued breathing following ventricular fibrillation has here-to-fore not been described.METHODS:We analyzed the spontaneous ventilatory activity during the first several minutes of ventricular fibrillation (VF) in our isoflurane anesthesized swine model of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. The frequency and type of ventilatory activity was monitored by pneumotachometer and main stream infrared capnometer and analyzed in 61 swine during the first 3 to 6 minutes of untreated VF.RESULTS:During the first minute of VF, the air flow pattern in all 61 swine was similar to those recorded during regular spontaneous breathing during anesthesia and was clearly different from the patterns of gasping. The average rate of continued breathing during the first minute of untreated VF was 10 breaths per minute. During the second minute of untreated VF, spontaneous breathing activity either stopped or became typical of gasping. During minutes 2 to 5 of untreated VF, most animals exhibited very slow spontaneous ventilatory activity with a pattern typical of gaspingand the pattern of gasping was crescendo-decrescendo, as has been previously reported. In the absence of therapy, all ventilatory activity stopped 6 minutes after VF cardiac arrest.CONCLUSION:In our swine model of VF cardiac arrest, we documented that normal breathing continued for the first minute following cardiac arrest.
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1471-2261Version
Final published versionAdditional Links
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2261/10/36ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1186/1471-2261-10-36
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © 2010 Zuercher et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0).