[Current status of preclinical resuscitation. An overview based on recent literature and personal results]

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation is one of the most important topics in modern emergency care medicine. Especially the management of the prehospital cardiac arrest is a region of interest. This article is an attempt to show the current situation of the out-of-hospital resuscitation in the german-speaking area. In an own analysis of 166 resuscitations by emergency physicians and by consideration of results from other groups we found an outcome between four and seventeen percent finally successful resuscitations. The main prognostically favourable factors seem to be the following: non-traumatic cause for the cardiac arrest, ventricular fibrillation as the primarily ECG-statement and begin with CPR within ten minutes.