Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for October 18, 2008 AH, HA, HA, HA...

Ya know...focusing so much on Cairo School District Number One can be a real downer. It's the weekend...let's move on to a cheerier topic...cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Wanna stay alive?

Forget "Disco is Dead"...

In fact, Disco could keep you here...or even bring you back!

And...before you reject Disco out of hand, consider the alternate choice for resuscitation background music...from the group, Queen!

EDITOR'S NOTE: Found an old picture of me from my "Disco Years"...thought I'd throw it in for a laugh. Don't know what I ever did with that white suit...

Study: Bee Gees' 'Stayin' Alive' Has Perfect Beat for CPR

From Fox News

"Stayin' Alive" might be more true to its name than the Bee Gees ever could have guessed: At 103 beats per minute, the old disco song has almost the perfect rhythm to help jump-start a stopped heart.

And in a small but intriguing study from the University of Illinois medical school, doctors and students maintained close to the ideal number of chest compressions doing CPR while listening to the catchy, sung-in-falsetto tune from the 1977 movie "Saturday Night Fever."

The American Heart Association recommends 100 chest compressions per minute, far more than most people realize, study author Dr. David Matlock of the school's Peoria, Ill., campus said Thursday.

And while CPR can triple cardiac arrest survival rates when properly performed, many people hesitate to do it because they're not sure about keeping the proper rhythm, Matlock said.

He found that "Stayin' Alive," which has a way of getting stuck in your head anyway, can help with that.

His study involved 15 students and doctors and had two parts. First they did CPR on mannequins while listening to the song on iPods. They were asked to time chest compressions with the song's beat.

Five weeks later, they did the same drill without the music but were told to think of the song while doing compressions.

The average number of compressions the first time was 109 per minute; the second time it was 113. That's more than recommended, but Matlock said that when it comes to trying to revive a stopped heart, a few extra compressions per minute is better than too few.

"It drove them and motivated them to keep up the rate, which is the most important thing," he said.

The study showed the song helped people who already know how to do CPR, and the results were promising enough to warrant larger, more definitive studies with real patients or untrained people, Matlock said.

He plans to present his findings at an American College of Emergency Physicians meeting in Chicago this month.

It turns out the American Heart Association has been using the song as a training tip for CPR instructors for about two years. They learned of it from a physician "who sort of hit upon this as a training tool," said association spokesman Dr. Vinay Nadkarni of the University of Pennsylvania.

He said he was not aware of any previous studies that tested the song.

But Nadkarni said he has seen "Stayin' Alive" work wonders in classes where students were having trouble keeping the right beat while practicing on mannequins. When he turned on the song, "all of a sudden, within just a few seconds, they get it right on the dot."

"I don't know how the Bee Gees knew this," Nadkarni said. "They probably didn't. But they just hit upon this natural rhythm that was very catchy, very popular, that helps us do the right thing."

Dr. Matthew Gilbert, a 28-year-old medical resident, was among participants in the University of Illinois study this past spring. Since then, he said, he has revived real patients by keeping the song in his head while doing CPR.

Gilbert said he was surprised the song worked as well as it did.

"I was a little worried because I've been told that I have a complete lack of rhythm," he said. Also, Gilbert said he's not really a disco fan.

He does happen to like a certain Queen song with a similar beat.

"I heard a rumor that 'Another One Bites the Dust' works also, but it didn't seem quite as appropriate," Gilbert said.

From The Canadian Press...

Matching tempo of disco classic 'Stayin' Alive' may do the trick in CPR

The Canadian Press

TORONTO — When it comes to performing CPR, the trick may be in channelling your inner Bee Gee.

A new study shows that matching the tempo of the Bee Gees' 1977 disco classic "Stayin' Alive" helps people performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation to reach 100 chest compressions per minute, the mark recommended by both the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and the American Heart Association.

The researchers, from the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria, didn't come up with the idea of using the aptly named song to gauge how quickly one needs to compress the chest of a person whose heart has stopped.

But they wanted to see if the notion - thought up by a pediatric emergency medicine physician from Hawaii named Alson Inaba - actually worked.

"We thought it definitely helped," said Dr. Elizabeth Bochewitz, one of the researchers and herself an emergency medicine resident at the University of Illinois.

"Nobody went under 100 (beats per minute), which in a resuscitation scenario and (with) everything else going on, people do drop under 100. They get distracted. They're not paying attention. This helps keep their focus, we think."

Inaba said he hit upon the song as the perfect accompaniment for CPR a few years ago, and shared the idea with the American Heart Association. In 2006, he published a short article outlining the tip in an issue of the AHA's newsletter, Currents.

Inaba liked the song as a teaching tool not just because the beat is virtually perfectly timed - 101 beats a minute - but also because the song's title both stands as a mission statement for the heart association and for what a person performing CPR is trying to accomplish.

"Hollywood ... could not even write a script that's better than this," Inaba, who works at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children, said Thursday from Honolulu.

Dr. Christian Vaillancourt, an emergency medicine physician at the Ottawa Health Research Institute, studies bystander CPR - why people do and don't perform CPR and how to improve the quality of CPR when it is attempted.

He likes the notion of using the song to help people understand how rapidly they need to pump the chest during CPR, saying few people have a clear idea of how fast 100 beats a minute actually is.

"It used to be 60 a minute," he said. "And for most people that's easy. Everybody can count seconds."

"But when you start to say or mention 100 per minute, most people don't have a concept of how fast this is. So if you can relate this to something like a song, that's really great."

Still, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada said it was too soon to adopt the technique, saying it's not yet clear the tool would work among people without medical training. The subjects for the University of Illinois study were medical residents and interns.

Vaillancourt agreed more study is needed, but he said he was "intrigued" by what he'd seen so far.

Bochewitz said the small pilot study was performed to see if it would be worthwhile to do a larger study testing the technique as a training tool for individuals without medical training.

In the first part of the study, they asked subjects to perform CPR on mannequins while listening to the song on an iPod. Five weeks or more later, the same subjects were asked to repeat the test, this time without the accompaniment. Instead they were urged to sing or hum the song in their heads.

When the music was playing the participants performed, on average, 109 compressions per minute. When they were singing to themselves, they actually performed at an average rate of 113 compressions per minute.

While it is actually possible to pump too fast, 109 and 113 compressions a minute are still in the recommended zone, Bochewitz said.

She noted some other songs have also been suggested as training tools, including Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust."

"For obvious reasons, though, we thought 'Stayin' Alive' was more appropriate for the context," she said.

The study will be presented later this month at the annual meeting of the American College of Emergency Physicians in Chicago.