Rescuer's work capacity and duration of cardiopulmonary resuscitation

Specific training in the techniques of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) has been the major aim of CPR education for both health care professionals and lay people over the past few decades. We performed a randomized trial to evaluate individual physiological parameters of 12 professional rescuers influencing duration and quality of standard CPR and active compression-decompression CPR. CPR duration was assessed according to individual work capacity after grouping rescuers as untrained and trained individuals, according to their work capacity of up to and including 100% and over 100%. The average work capacity of all the rescuers was determined by incremental exercise testing, resulting in 110.0 +/- 26.5% compared with data for the normal population. With 29.3 +/- 12.8 min duration, standard CPR was significantly longer than active compression-decompression CPR with 15.5 +/- 10.2 min duration (P = 0.009). No changes in the forces of compression and decompression were measured during active compression-decompression CPR, thus demonstrating maintenance of constant CPR quality. Duration of resuscitation was influenced by the CPR method performed and by the individual work capacity (P = 0.004 and P = 0.027, respectively). We conclude that the duration of CPR depends both on the method applied and the rescuers' individual work capacity and recommend improvement of work capacity by aerobic training especially for professional rescuers.