Sudden Cardiac Arrest Research Paper

By: Ashley Ellis Our hearts are the most important muscle in our body, which means that we have to make sure that it’s always working properly. It can extremely fatal if it fails. In fact, SCA, or Sudden Cardiac Arrest, causes more than 350,000 deaths in the U.S. alone each year and is one of the leading causes of death (in the U.S.). Thankfully, Claude Beck, an American heart surgeon, was able to contribute to solving this problem. First, what we need to know is the history of heart surgery and how the heart gets itself into these stressful situations. Arrhythmia is when the heart beats irregularly. This can cause someone to go into SCA or sudden cardiac arrest. The most common problem shown with SCA is ventricular fibrillation. This happens when the ventricles of the heart beat very rapidly and irregularly. The machine was first tested on animals that were manually sent into fibrillation. The first use of a defibrillator was by Claude Beck in 1947 on a 14 year old boy after he had an operation. However, this defibrillator was used on directly on the heart of the patient, unlike nowadays. …show more content…
To combat this, he would massage the patient’s heart to stabilize them. However, this did not always work and the patient would die from fibrillation during the operation. Claude wished there was something that could help so he began experimenting on animals. He discovered that if the animal was defibrillated shortly after going into fibrillation, there was a chance it could recover. In 1947, when he first used this method to revive the 14 year old boy, he used the very first defibrillator, which used spoons as the electrode