Vasopressin, epinephrine, and corticosteroids for in-hospital cardiac arrest

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Vasopressin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

In cardiac arrest, cortisol levels are relatively low during and after cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 100 patients taking part.

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults, middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

The researchers enrolled 100 consecutive patients with cardiac arrest requiring epinephrine according to current resuscitation guidelines.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover and parallel-group study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Vasopressin and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Neither the patients nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Vasopressin, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Vasopressin group a baseline to be compared against.

In the crossover set-up each of the patients took both Vasopressin and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

The researchers conducted a single-center, prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group trial.

Primary end points were return of spontaneous circulation for 15 minutes or longer and survival to hospital discharge.

What Was Measured

In cardiac arrest, cortisol levels are relatively low during and after cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, Cause of Death, Confidence Intervals, Emergency Service, Hospital, Epinephrine, Heart Arrest and Hospital Mortality.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Vasopressin in 100 patients.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 4 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2009 (Archives of internal medicine), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Vasopressin compound page.