Analysis of patients with cardiopulmonary arrest after recreational scuba diving at Eastern Shizuoka in Japan

Abstract

Recreational scuba diving may induce cardiac arrest due to drowning, decompression illness (DCI) or the occurrence of internal disease; however, there have been few reports that have analyzed the fatal compared with surviving cases in such circumstances. Accordingly, we retrospectively investigated the features and outcomes of patients who experienced DCI during the recreational diving. A medical chart review was retrospectively performed for all patients who had DCI after recreational scuba diving and were transported through the physician-staffed helicopter emergency medical services between March 2006 and June 2013. Subjects were divided into two groups based on whether they had experienced cardiac arrest (arrest group) or not (control group). The six cases were treated as the arrest group and 55 cases were treated as the control group. There were no significant differences concerning the sex (male/female: 3/3 vs. 35/20), age (45.5 ± 6.2 vs. 42.7 ± 1.7) and ratio of emergency surfacing (yes/no: 5/1 vs. 35/20) between the two groups. The ratio of the occurrence of cardiac arrest in the summer season tended to be lower than that during the non-summer season (20 vs. 129%, P = 0.06) and the ratio of amateurs in the arrest group tended to be higher than that in the Control group (100 vs. 68%, P = 0.05), however, these differences were not statistically significant. All the subjects in the Arrest group died and all subjects in the control group survived (P Language: en