Is survival from prehospital cardiac arrest critically dependent upon response time?
Delay to the initiation of BLS and ACLS intervention influenced outcome from prehospital cardiac arrest negatively. There were no survivors after prolonged delay in initiation of ACLS of 30 min or greater or total resuscitation and transport time of 90 min. This result was not influenced by giving bicarbonate, the primary study intervention, except at longer arrest times.
Wide variability in clinicians' pretest probability estimates of disease may present a possible concern about decision-making models based on Bayes' theorem, because it may ultimately yield inconsistent posttest disease estimates.