Effect of the addition of vasopressin or vasopressin plus nitroglycerin to epinephrine on arterial blood pressure during cardiopulmonary resuscitation in humans

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Vasopressin in the context of low blood pressure and orthostatic hypotension, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Several vasoactive drugs have been tested alone or in combination, but their hemodynamic effects have not been investigated clinically in humans.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 48 patients taking part.

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

The study included 48 patients with witnessed cardiac arrest.

Patients received either epinephrine alone (E alone) or epinephrine plus vasopressin (E+V) or epinephrine plus vasopressin plus nitroglycerin (E+V+N).

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized and double-blind.

Because people in this Vasopressin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

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

A prospective, randomized, double-blinded controlled trial in the prehospital setting.

A femoral arterial catheter was inserted for arterial pressure measurement.

What Was Measured

Several vasoactive drugs have been tested alone or in combination, but their hemodynamic effects have not been investigated clinically in humans.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Blood Pressure, Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, Diastole, Epinephrine, Heart Arrest, Nitroglycerin and Paris.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and double-blind study of Vasopressin in 48 patients in people with low blood pressure and orthostatic hypotension.

Its findings take up roughly 5 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2011 (The Journal of emergency medicine), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Vasopressin compound page, Low blood pressure and orthostatic hypotension research.