Abstract

Background: Understanding the prognosis of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients is vital to informing resuscitation and advanced care planning decisions. However, short-term outcomes such as survival to hospital discharge do not account for post-arrest quality of life and medical costs. Objective: To investigate the survival time, long-term health-related quality of life, and health care costs of OHCA survivors. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of all adult OHCA survivors of cardiac origin between 1 August 2016 and 31 December 2017 in a tertiary medical center in Taiwan. Chinese version of EuroQol-5D-5L (EQ-5D-5L) was used for measuring health-related quality of life at 1 month, 6 month and 1 year post-discharge. Survival and health care costs data were collected. Descriptive statistics and Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Test were used for data analysis. Results: During the study period, 30 of 163 (18.4%) OHCA of presumed cardiac origin survived to hospital discharge. The mean age for the survivors was 59 years. Most survivors were male (83.3%), and received bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (73.3%) and defibrillation (86.7%) in the prehospital settings. Of 30 survivors, 23 patients were cerebral performance category score (CPC) of 1 or 2 and 7 were CPC of 3 or 4. The median hospital stay and estimated median survival time for CPC 1-2 and CPC 3-4 were 17 days, 8.8 years and 34 days, 0.4 years, respectively. The mean EQ-5D-5L visual analogue scale score and index score (utility) for 13 CPC 1-2 survivors followed at 6 month post discharge were 75.58 ± 13.31 and 0.856 ± 0.125, respectively, and were significantly higher than the scores (65.38 ± 15.47, 0.689 ± 0.114) at 1 month. The median health care costs of the index admission and 6 month post-discharge for CPC 1-2 survivors were NT$ 655,866 and NT$ 46,550, respectively. Conclusion: The survival time and health related quality of life for OHCA survivors with good neurologic outcome is good and improves over time. It pays to save those lives.

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