The International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR) has updated the ACLS (Advanced Cardiac Life Support) recommendations by making excuses for the evidence.
We have been using epinephrine for 50 years without evidence of improved outcomes that matter to patients.
A Randomized Trial of Epinephrine in Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest (Paramedic2) shows that epinephrine does not improve outcomes for prehospital patients.
In conclusion, in this randomized trial involving patients with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, the use of epinephrine resulted in a significantly higher rate of survival at 30 days than the use of placebo, but there was no significant between-group difference in the rate of a favorable neurologic outcome because more survivors had severe neurologic impairment in the epinephrine group.
Rather than limit treatments to those with high quality evidence that they improve outcomes that matter to patients, the recommendation is to keep giving epinephrine, because eventually someone might provide something – anything – to support epinephrine.
What about amiodarone?
Amiodarone, Lidocaine, or Placebo in Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest (ALPS) showed that amiodarone also does not improve outcomes.
Conclusions Overall, neither amiodarone nor lidocaine resulted in a significantly higher rate of survival or favorable neurologic outcome than the rate with placebo among patients with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest due to initial shock-refractory ventricular fibrillation or pulseless ventricular tachycardia.
If amiodarone was mentioned, I missed it. Both epinephrine and amiodarone had large placebo-controlled research results released showing that the outcomes are worse with epinephrine and worse with amiodarone.
There is still no evidence that any ventilation produces better outcomes than compression-only resuscitation, but it looks like the intervention will continue to be recommended.
In the absence of evidence of benefit, inadequately tested interventions should be avoided.
The goal is to protect the patients, not to protect the interventions.
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