Cardiac arrest: An interdisciplinary review of the literature from 2018

Abstract

Objectives: The Interdisciplinary Cardiac Arrest Research Review (ICARE) group was formed in 2018 to conduct a systematic annual search of peer-reviewed literature relevant to cardiac arrest (CA). The goals of the review are to illustrate best practices and help reduce knowledge silos by disseminating clinically relevant advances in the field of CA across disciplines.

Methods: An electronic search of PubMed using keywords related to CA was conducted. Title and abstracts retrieved by these searches were screened for relevancy, separated by article type (original research or review), and sorted into 7 categories. Screened manuscripts underwent standardized scoring of overall methodological quality and importance. Articles scoring higher than 99 percentiles by category-type were selected for full critique. Systematic differences between editors and reviewer scores were assessed using Wilcoxon signed-rank test.

Results: A total of 9119 articles were identified on initial search; of these, 1214 were scored after screening for relevance and deduplication, and 80 underwent full critique. Prognostication & Outcomes category comprised 25% and Epidemiology & Public Health 17.5% of fully reviewed articles. There were no differences between editor and reviewer scoring.

Conclusions: The total number of articles demonstrates the need for an accessible source summarizing high-quality research findings to serve as a high-yield reference for clinicians and scientists seeking to absorb the ever-growing body of CA-related literature. This may promote further development of the unique and interdisciplinary field of CA medicine.

Keywords: Cardiopulmonary resuscitation; Emergency medical services; Epidemiology; Heart arrest; Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest; Sudden cardiac death.