A new study suggests that when someone collapses in front of witnesses, the chances of receiving potentially lifesaving CPR may partly depend on the color of their skin.
THURSDAY, Oct. 27, 2022 -- When someone collapses in front of witnesses, the chances of receiving potentially lifesaving CPR may partly depend on the color of their skin, a new study suggests.
But going into the study, the researchers expected that disparities would be lessened when cardiac arrests happened in public. With more people around, the chances that a bystander would be trained in CPR are greater. Disparities were not, however, confined to cardiac arrests that struck in white neighborhoods, he noted.
Chan's team used a large U.S. registry to find more than 110,000 cases of cardiac arrest where witnesses were present. Despite that, most victims did not receive CPR, with rates particularly low for Black and Hispanic people. Yet she also said she was not surprised. Even though more people are available to respond to a cardiac arrest in a public setting, Berlacher said, those people can have biases, conscious or not. Those biases, she noted, can affect how quickly they approach the person who collapsed, call 911 or try to find someone who knows CPR.