During the research, the team also found out that some patients are more vulnerable to having their ribs and other bones broken than others. When studying some patients who were admitted to hospitals in Korea, nearly a third of them who received resuscitation after CPR had at least one of their ribs broken and about 4 % had a broken sternum or breast bone. Dr. Michael Sayre, a professor at University of Washington Seattle and the spokesperson for American Heart Association said that even though broken ribs could be expected when CPR is being done, people shouldn’t hesitate from assisting people with a cardiac arrest just because of this.

Injuries suffered during CPR resuscitation

Sayre said that he had talked to several survivors of cardiac arrest and none of them seemed to say that they wished no one had given them the resuscitation just because their chest hurts. People are gland that someone had saved their life even though that cost them a rib or a breast bone. When conducting the study, Dr. Min Joung Kim led a team of researchers in CT scanning patients taken to emergency departments of eight hospitals between the months of January and June in 2011. They found out that all the patients had successfully received CPR either in the ED or before they got to the hospital.

Out of the 71 patients who were scanned, it was found that at least 14 patients had multiple breaks and 22 patients had at least one of their ribs broken. Only 3 patients had their breast bones broken- this is a cartilage plate connecting the ribs while some patients had additional injuries besides the broken bones like bruised lungs or blood in their chest wall.

High risk/ more vulnerable groups

Generally, it was clear that age didn’t play a role in determining the vulnerability of the patient of suffering fractures. However, most people, especially women had received CPR from another person rather than a doctor had a high likelihood of ending up with a broken rib. For instance, among patients who received compressions outside the hospital, 25 percent of those resuscitated by a paramedic ended up with rib fractures in comparison to 33 percent of those receiving CPR from lay people. For the patients who received CPR at the hospital, about 33 percent of those receiving compressions from a doctor suffered fractures, the same case to about 50 percent of those resuscitated by other people other than a doctor.

Women were found to be more vulnerable in having their ribs broken after CPR. Researchers attributed this to the fact that woman have a high likelihood of suffering from osteoporosis, a bone thinning disease. The researchers said that they couldn’t tell why patients who were resuscitated by doctors seemed to perform better.