• Question: How does resuscitation of the heart work within anaesthesiology?

    Asked by delaram123 to Dilwar, Lou, Rachel, Simon, Susan on 16 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Susan Skelton

      Susan Skelton answered on 16 Nov 2013:

      Hi delaram,
      I am not a medical doctor or biologist, so I’ll just give a short answer as much as I understand these things! I’m sure someone else will be along to give you a more indepth answer soon.

      The heart is a muscle which contracts and relaxes to pump blood around our bodies. If the heart stops beating, we can force it to contract and relax by rhythmically pushing on it. Sometimes this is enough to encourage the heart to start beating again by itself. If not, doctors can use a machine called a defibrillator which passes an electrical current through the heart, to shock it into action. Doctors also sometimes give the patient some adrenaline which also can help to restart the heart.

    • Photo: Simon Langley-Evans

      Simon Langley-Evans answered on 16 Nov 2013:

      The heart has the job of pumping blood around the body. First of all the blood goes to the lungs and picks up oxygen. The blood returns to the heart and is pumped to all parts of the body. If the heart is stopped then getting it working again quickly is essential as if the brain is starved of oxygen it is permanently damaged. If the person’s life is to be saved resuscitation has to happen within minutes.

      There are different ways of resuscitation. The one that any of us can do is CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation). This is simply pushing down on the chest of the person and this actually pumps blood through the heart directly and keeps things going. That is just a temporary fix though and unless the heart restarts the process will have to be kickstarted through electrically shocking the heart using a defibrillator. As well as getting it started again, it has to get into the right rhythm.

    • Photo: Rachel Dakin

      Rachel Dakin answered on 17 Nov 2013:

      Giving an electric shock using a defibrillator works on the hearts own pace maker. The pace maker makes the heart pump using electrical pulses. Sometimes these electrical pulses become irregular, or some of the cells in the pace maker give out signals at a different time to others. The defibrillator can get all of the cells sending out impulses at the same time and in a rhythm again.
      Modern day defibrillators are really clever -they have instructions inside them to show you where to stick the patches which link the person to the machine. They then actually detect whether the person needs an electric shock – if they don’t it can do more damage than good.

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