Public awareness of cardiopulmonary resuscitation and cardiac arrest in association with Christian Eriksen

Abstract

ObjectivesDuring the Union of European Football Association EURO 2020 Football Championship, Danish football player Christian Eriksen experienced a cardiac arrest on the field of play. With prompt intervention and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), Erikson had a positive outcome and survived the arrest. Our goal is to determine the extent to which this event informed the general population about cardiac arrests and CPR. Study designThis was a cross-sectional internet analysis. MethodsFirst, Google Trends was used to identify the search interest of topics “Cardiopulmonary resuscitation,” “Myocardial infarction,” and disease “Cardiac arrest” worldwide from May 29, 2021, to June 19, 2021. Second, we downloaded Twitter data via Sprout Social using the keywords “CPR” and “cardiac arrest,” which are presented as the absolute number of tweets. An ARIMA model was used to forecast expected search volumes. ResultsThe following week, there was an increase of 91.72% (95% confidence interval [CI] 89.01–94.93) for “Cardiac arrest” above expected values, an 80.67% (95% CI 75.84–85.5) increase for “Cardiopulmonary resuscitation,” and a 65.50% (95% CI 62.98–68.02) increase for “Myocardial infarction.” Within Twitter, there was a peak increase in daily tweets using “CPR” by 184,706 (95% CI 181,933–187,479) beyond expected values and a peak increase in the daily tweets using “cardiac arrest” by 73,126 (95% CI 72,499–73,752). ConclusionAlthough all cardiac arrests are undesirable, public knowledge of the positive effects of CPR could contribute to a means of promoting and increasing the desire for CPR awareness as well as its application.