Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest remains a leading cause of mortality in the United States, and the majority of patients who die after achieving return of spontaneous circulation die from withdrawal of care due to a perceived poor neurologic prognosis. Unfortunately, withdrawal of care often occurs during the first day of admission and research suggests this early withdrawal of care may be premature and result in unnecessary deaths for patients who would have made a full neurologic recovery. In this review, we explore the evidence for neurologic prognostication in the emergency department for patients who achieve return of spontaneous circulation after an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.
Keywords: cardiac arrest; early prognostication; emergency department; neuroprognostication; out‐of‐hospital cardiac arrest; prognostication; return of spontaneous circulation.
© 2020 The Authors. JACEP Open published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of the American College of Emergency Physicians.