The defibrillator is a life-saving device that administers an electric shock to the heart of a cardiac arrest victim in an effort to restore its natural rhythm. The Red Cross estimates that 350,000 Americans will suffer cardiac arrest this year. Each minute defibrillation is delayed lowers the victim’s chance of survival by 10%. While most people are familiar with the general purpose of a defibrillator, few people know its history and origins.<\/p>\n

Swedish physiologists\u00a0Jean-Louis Pr\u00e9vost and Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Batelli are credited with inventing the world’s first\u00a0defibrillator in 1899. During their experiments, they concluded that small electric shocks could produce ventricular fibrillation but larger ones could have the opposite effect by restarting the heart.\u00a0Pr\u00e9vost and Batelli’s defibrillator, however, was restricted for use in veterinarian practices.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t until 1947 when professor Claude Beck of Case Western Reserve University used the defibrillator on a human for the first time. Beck was performing open heart surgery on a young boy who suffered from a congenital heart defect when the boy’s heart stopped. Beck and his team of assistants manually massaged the boy’s heart for nearly an hour before eventually using a defibrillator to promote a\u00a0normal sinus rhythm. The success of this practice laid the groundwork for future surgeons and cardiologists, essentially showing the world that defibrillation can save lives.<\/p>\n

These early model defibrillator ran off alternating current (AC) power from a nearby wall outlet (usually between 300-100o volts of electricity), and they were only useful during open heart surgery. This greatly restricted their utility, but it wasn’t before new, high-tech models hit the medical field.<\/p>\n

Irish professor\u00a0Frank Pantridge of Belfast made a ground-breaking developing in defibrillators during the 1960s by turning these otherwise bulky units into compact, easy-to-transport models. While the design and features of portable defibrillators have undergone a serious of chances since then, its purpose remains the same: to provide a jolt of electricity to a cardiac arrest victim’s heart in an effort to create a normal sinus rhythm. The portable defibrillator is a staple tool used by Emergency Medical Service (EMS) workers.<\/p>\n

Modern-day science has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for defibrillator. One of the most recent advancements in this field includes the use of\u00a0\u00a0biphasic waveform. By alternating pulse directions,\u00a0biphasic defibrillators tend to have a higher success rate. \u00a0A small study found the success rate of ventricular fibrillation (VF) to be 60%, whereas the success rate of biphasic defibrillation was 90%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The defibrillator is a life-saving device that administers an electric shock to the heart of a cardiac arrest victim in an effort to restore its natural rhythm. The Red Cross …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[160],"tags":[158,159,161],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oceansidecpr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3770"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oceansidecpr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oceansidecpr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oceansidecpr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oceansidecpr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3770"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.oceansidecpr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4940,"href":"https:\/\/www.oceansidecpr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3770\/revisions\/4940"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oceansidecpr.com\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oceansidecpr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oceansidecpr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oceansidecpr.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}