US, Canada bystanders less likely to give women life-saving CPR, new research reveals
- One reason for the gender gap could be that people are uncomfortable touching a woman’s breast in public without consent, Montreal doctor Alexis Cournoyer said
- The mouth-to-mouth breathing and chest compressions to those whose hearts have stopped beating potentially staves off death until medical help arrives
Bystanders are less likely to give life-saving CPR to women having a cardiac arrest in public than men, leading to more women dying from the common health emergency, researchers said on Monday.
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) combines mouth-to-mouth breathing and chest compressions to pump blood to the brain of people whose hearts have stopped beating, potentially staving off death until medical help arrives.
In research to be presented at a medical conference in Spain this week, but which has not yet been peer-reviewed, a team of Canadian doctors sought to understand how bystanders administer the procedure differently to men and women.
They looked at records of cardiac arrests that took place outside hospital in the United States and Canada between 2005 and 2015, which included nearly 40,000 patients.
Overall, 54 per cent of the patients received CPR from a bystander, the research said.
For cardiac arrests in a public place, such as in the street, 61 per cent of women were given CPR by a bystander – compared to 68 per cent of men.
Alexis Cournoyer, an emergency doctor at the Hopital du Sacre-Coeur de Montreal who conducted the research, said this gap “increases women’s mortality following a cardiac arrest – that’s for sure”.