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Observational Study
. 2022 May 16;26(1):137.
doi: 10.1186/s13054-022-03999-x.

Termination-of-resuscitation rule in the emergency department for patients with refractory out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: a nationwide, population-based observational study

Yoshikazu Goto  1 , Akira Funada  2 , Tetsuo Maeda  3 , Yumiko Goto  4
Affiliations
Observational Study

Termination-of-resuscitation rule in the emergency department for patients with refractory out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: a nationwide, population-based observational study

Yoshikazu Goto et al. Crit Care. .

Abstract

Background: In Japan, emergency medical service (EMS) providers are prohibited from field termination-of-resuscitation (TOR) in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients. In 2013, we developed a TOR rule for emergency department physicians (Goto's TOR rule) immediately after hospital arrival. However, this rule is subject to flaws, and there is a need for revision owing to its relatively low specificity for predicting mortality compared with other TOR rules in the emergency department. Therefore, this study aimed to develop and validate a modified Goto's TOR rule by considering prehospital EMS cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) duration.

Methods: We analysed the records of 465,657 adult patients with OHCA from the All-Japan Utstein registry from 2016 to 2019 and divided them into two groups: development (n = 231,363) and validation (n = 234,294). The primary outcome measures were specificity, false-positive rate (FPR), and positive predictive value (PPV) of the revised TOR rule in the emergency department for predicting 1-month mortality.

Results: Recursive partitioning analysis for the development group in predicting 1-month mortality revealed that a modified Goto's TOR rule could be defined if patients with OHCA met the following four criteria: (1) initial asystole, (2) unwitnessed arrest by any laypersons, (3) EMS-CPR duration > 20 min, and (4) no prehospital return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC). The specificity, FPR, and PPV of the rule for predicting 1-month mortality were 99.2% (95% confidence interval [CI], 99.0-99.4%), 0.8% (0.6-1.0%), and 99.8% (99.8-99.9%), respectively. The proportion of patients who fulfilled the rule and the area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) was 27.5% (95% CI 27.3-27.7%) and 0.904 (0.902-0.905), respectively. In the validation group, the specificity, FPR, PPV, proportion of patients who met the rule, and AUC were 99.1% (95% CI 98.9-99.2%), 0.9% (0.8-1.1%), 99.8% (99.8-99.8%), 27.8% (27.6-28.0%), and 0.889 (0.887-0.891), respectively.

Conclusion: The modified Goto's TOR rule (which includes the following four criteria: initial asystole, unwitnessed arrest, EMS-CPR duration > 20 min, and no prehospital ROSC) with a > 99% predictor of 1-month mortality is a reliable tool for physicians treating refractory OHCAs immediately after hospital arrival.

Keywords: Cardiopulmonary resuscitation; Emergency department; Epidemiology; Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest; Outcome; Termination-of-resuscitation rule.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Flow chart of the patient inclusion criteria. CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation; EMS, emergency medical service
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Result of recursive partitioning analysis for predicting 1-month mortality in the development group. CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation; EMS, emergency medical service; ROSC, return of spontaneous circulation
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Flow chart algorithm of the modified Goto’s termination-of-resuscitation rule for emergency department physicians. CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation; EMS, emergency medical service; ROSC, return of spontaneous circulation
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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