CPR facts and trivia

Ok let’s try something new this week.  This week we’ll do a bit of trivia for those trivia buffs out there.  Who knows when one of these little bits of interesting facts might be on “Jeopardy” or even “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”  Ok, so here goes.

1)      When was the first reported recommendation for the use of mouth to mouth for drowning victims, and where was it at?  Believe it or not, the first time it was recommended was in Paris, France back in 1740.

2)      Where and who gave the first documented chest compressions?  This took place over 150 years later in 1891 by Dr. Friedrich Maas, but it was 12 years later, in 1903, when Dr. George Crile performed the first successful use of the compressions.  The following year Dr. Crile also performed the first closed chest cardiac massage.

3)      Who holds the claim for figuring out that expired air (the outgoing breaths we use for mouth to mouth) would work just as well for oxygenation?  That claim to fame goes to James Elam, in 1954, over 200 years after it was first recommended back in France.  Two years later James and his partner, Peter Safar, invent mouth to mouth as we know it today.  The following year the US military adopts it as a way to revive unresponsive victims.

4)      When was the first program established for emergency dispatchers to use over the phone instructions for CPR and where?  It was begun in King County, Washington back in 1981, and was so successful that every dispatcher now has the ability to handle that over the phone.

5)      When was the first introduction of pediatric CPR?  That wasn’t addressed until 1988, cosponsored with The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).  Apparently, it wasn’t something many people thought about until that point in time.

6)      What year did the American Heart Association (AHA) make significant changes to the compression to ventilation requirements?  That happened in 2005 at the International Consensus on ECC and CPR Science with Treatment Recommendations (CoSTR) Conference.  They changed the amount of times you do compressions before you ventilate the victim as well as added in some AED changes as well.  Three years later they recommended any adult giving assistance to a fallen bystander to only do chest compressions until certified help arrives. 

Ok, so there is a bit of CPR facts you may never have known and now can stump your friends with some of the newest bit of trivia you just learned.  Check out the AHA website for more facts of CPR we may not have gone over here.  That site is www.heart.org and is where we found the facts we listed here today.