Response to Letters Regarding Article, “Bystander-Initiated Rescue Breathing for Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrests of Noncardiac Origin”

Abstract

We thank Dr Rai, Dr Arrich, and their colleagues for their relevant comments on our article.1 As Rai and colleagues pointed out, the recent randomized, controlled trial2 of dispatcher instructions to bystanders for performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) failed to show statistical differences between chest compression-only and conventional CPR with rescue breathing in its subgroup analysis: the good neurological outcome after out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCAs) of noncardiac origin was 6.9% (13/188) in the conventional CPR group and 4.4% (9/204) in the compression-only CPR group ( P =0.28). This might be due to its small sample size, and the results are consistent with ours. Since survival after OHCAs of noncardiac origin is generally low regardless of type of CPR, a large sample size is needed to address this issue, and our study …