Better heart care: USA Health Children’s & Women’s Hospital joins multicenter study on cardiac arrest care for pediatric patients
“The insights gained could also help save more lives in the future and improve outcomes for children experiencing cardiac arrests,” — Mukul Sehgal, M.D., MBA, FAAP
By Casandra Andrews
candrews@health.southalabama.edu
With goals of saving more children who suffer from cardiac arrest and enhancing CPR protocols, USA Health Children’s & Women’s Hospital has joined a multicenter collaborative study that will assess up to 7,000 cardiac arrest cases at 100 hospitals.
More research is needed on the topic because current CPR guidelines are mostly based on adult data, leaving a gap in understanding how best to help kids during emergencies, said pediatric intensivist Mukul Sehgal, M.D., MBA, FAAP, who will serve as the site principal investigator for the study in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at Children’s & Women’s Hospital.
CPR stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, a method that can help save someone’s life during cardiac arrest, when the heart stops beating or beats too ineffectively to circulate blood to the brain and other vital organs, according to the American Heart Association. Sehgal is an assistant professor of pediatrics in the division of pediatric critical care at the Frederick P. Whiddon College of Medicine, where his duties include teaching physicians in training.
Cardiac arrests in children are a major public health issue with thousands of pediatric patients each year treated with CPR and managed after a cardiac arrest. Unfortunately, neurological outcomes following in-hospital CPR events can vary, and sometimes leave children with neurological deficits.
As part of the cardiac arrest project’s protocol, all attending physicians in the hospital’s PICU will undergo training by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia team members for data assimilation and entry procedures.
Key goals for the multiyear study include:
- Assess CPR quality: Analyze how well CPR is performed in different hospitals.
- Link CPR to survival: Investigate how CPR techniques affect survival rates.
- Post-care matters: Examine how care after cardiac arrest impacts recovery.
- Monitor responses: Study how children's bodies respond to medications like epinephrine during CPR to find the best dosing strategies.
“The insights gained could also help save more lives in the future,” Sehgal said, “and improve outcomes for children experiencing cardiac arrests.”
