This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Pacemakers/ Defibrillators  • Medical Practice  • Health Policy  • Critical Care/ Intensive Care Medicine  • Adult Critical Care  • Cardiovascular System  • Quality of Life  • Cardiovascular Intervention  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: The Commentary on clinical benefits and legal liability associated with automated external defibrillators (AEDs) by Dr Estes and colleagues¹ addresses litigation prospects from harm resulting from use of an AED when a patient receives an inappropriate shock or fails to receive a needed shock. However, the clinical benefits and risks that are the private interests of each successful shock recipient and family are less fully clarified. For a person whose heart stops for more than 250 seconds before cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is initiated, the liability is not tort litigation; it is an approximately 50% probability of permanent brain disability.² Most legislators and citizens are unaware of this downside of CPR survival.³

AEDs have been shown to improve the primary outcome of CPR by increasing the percentage of cardiac arrest patients surviving to hospital discharge (14% vs 23%; P = .03).⁴ But in that study, the range of brain . . . [Full Text of this Article]

William M. Landau, MD
landauw@neuro.wustl.edu
Washington University School of Medicine
Saint Louis, Mo

Allan S. Jaffe, MD

Mayo Medical School
Rochester, Minn

Richard D. Wetzel, PhD
Washington University School of Medicine

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLES

Benefits vs the Harms of Automated External Defibrillator Use—Reply
N. A. Mark Estes, III, Paul Weinberg, and Hannah England
JAMA. 2006;295(24):2850.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

The Automated External Defibrillator: Clinical Benefits and Legal Liability
Hannah England, Paul S. Weinberg, and N. A. Mark Estes, III
JAMA. 2006;295(6):687-690.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT