What would you do if you were near someone whose heart suddenly stopped?

It’s a terrifying proposition — especially since, more often than not, you have a personal relationship with that person; outside of a hospital setting, most incidents of sudden cardiac arrest occur in the home.

The American Heart Association estimates that more than 326,000 incidents of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest occur each year. Whether or not that cardiac arrest is witnessed by another person — and whether or not the person who witnessed the cardiac arrest knows CPR — more often than not determines if the person experiencing the cardiac arrest will survive.

Understanding Sudden Cardiac Arrest

The best way to explain sudden cardiac arrest is to consider the heart as an electric pump. Electric signals from the brain tell the heart to beat, pumping blood throughout the body. Those signals travel across the heart, causing the muscles of the heart to contract and relax, drawing blood into the heart and pushing it out.

Often during a cardiac arrest, there’s a problem with the electrical signals that tell the heart to work. These signals can cause an irregular heartbeat, called an arrhythmia, which reduces the heart’s efficiency or causes it to stop completely.

Sudden cardiac arrest is different from a heart attack. During a heart attack, an artery that supplies blood to the heart becomes blocked, preventing the heart from receiving oxygen. However, during a heart attack, the heart typically continues to pump. Cardiac arrest can occur after a heart attack, especially if a part of the heart was damaged from not receiving oxygen during the heart attack.

The sad reality is that most people do not survive a sudden cardiac arrest. The American Heart Association puts the survival rate for out-of-hospital sudden cardiac arrest at just more than 10 percent. Two-thirds of people who experience a sudden cardiac arrest observed by a bystander still die. However, for those who experience sudden cardiac arrest that no one sees or no one knows how to respond to, the mortality rate is 100 percent.

The best chance a person has to survive cardiac arrest is to be near a witness and an automated external defibrillator (AED) — a device that can read a person’s heart rhythm and apply a shock as necessary to try to bring a heart back into a normal rhythm. Since these devices are expensive and far from ubiquitous, the next best — and most realistic — chance for survival is that whoever witnesses the cardiac arrest knows at least the fundamentals to perform CPR.

Sudden cardiac arrest can occur after intense physical activity or can be caused by:

• Structural heart diseases
• Electrolyte imbalance
• Electrical shock
• Extreme stress due to the body
• Severe lack of oxygen, such as after drowning or asphyxiation
• Cardiac rhythm disturbances
• Cardiomyopathy (weakness in heart muscle)

That’s why many people who experience sudden cardiac arrest do not have a history of, or even few risk factors for, heart disease. It can happen to anyone.

Learning CPR is Easy

The good news: saving a life with CPR isn’t rocket science. It doesn’t require a special certification or a medical background to save a life using CPR. Research has shown that simply knowing the fundamentals is enough to dramatically increase your ability to save the life of someone who experiences sudden cardiac arrest.

Tanner periodically offers free “CPR is Easy to Learn” classes throughout the region.

The class is free to attend, and you will receive a training kit that includes a mannequin, a training DVD and more so you can refresh your skills and, hopefully, pass that knowledge on to others.

Even if you don’t take the class at Tanner, you can find other opportunities to learn CPR through the American Heart Association. It doesn’t take long, and what you learn can save a life.

For more information about cardiology services at Tanner, visit Tanner Heart Care.

Tanner Heart & Vascular Specialists has locations in Bremen, Carrollton, Villa Rica and Wedowee. For more information, visit HeartAndVascularSpecialists.org or call 770-812-9326.