Vasopressin and steroids in addition to adrenaline in cardiac arrest (VAST-A) - A randomised pilot study

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Vasopressin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

This pilot study assesses feasibility and safety of randomising patients to this combination therapy compared to standard care.

Who Took Part

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

Witnessed IHCAs meeting criteria for adrenaline were randomised 1:1 to adrenaline, vasopressin, and corticosteroids (intervention) or adrenaline and placebo (control).

Primary outcomes included feasibility (e.g., protocol adherence, event times, enrolment rate), and safety.

How the Study Was Run

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

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.

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Vasopressin.

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

It is described as a pilot, a small early test of whether a larger Vasopressin study would be practical.

A randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot study was conducted from December 2022 to June 2024 across three Swedish hospitals (NCT05139849).

Secondary outcome was return of spontaneous circulation.

What Was Measured

This pilot study assesses feasibility and safety of randomising patients to this combination therapy compared to standard care.

PubMed files the paper under topics including Pilot Projects, Epinephrine, Vasopressins, Heart Arrest, Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, Feasibility Studies and Vasoconstrictor Agents.

Author keywords: Cardiac arrest, Corticosteroids, IHCA, RCT and Randomized clinical trial.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

Results are reported in around 7 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2025 (Resuscitation), a journal based in Ireland.

More context: the Vasopressin compound page, all human trials.