GEN-ERIC News

A biomedical engineer at Purdue University has developed a new method to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation that promises to be more effective than standard CPR because it increases nourishing blood flow through the heart by 25 percent over the current method. A new technique is desperately needed because conventional CPR has a success rate of 5 percent to 10 percent, depending on how fast rescuers are able to respond and how well the procedure is performed. For every one minute of delay, the resuscitation rate decreases by 10 percent. “In other words, at 10 minutes, the resuscitation is absolutely ineffective,” said Leslie Geddes, Showalter Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. “Any medical procedure that had that low a success rate would be abandoned right away. But the alternative is not very good, either: Don’t do CPR and the person is going to die.”