Hormone Seen Saving Lives in Heart Attacks

A hormone called vasopressin is clearly better at saving the lives of patients whose hearts have stopped than the drug doctors have been using for the past 100 years, according to a study that could transform the treatment of sudden cardiac arrest.

For a century, cardiac arrest victims have been given epinephrine, a synthetic adrenaline that constricts blood vessels and boosts blood pressure.

It is often administered when shocking the heart with a defibrillator fails to revive the patient.

Using vasopressin instead improved the chances of reaching a hospital alive by about 40%, and tripled the chances of going home from the hospital, in patients with the most deadly type of cardiac arrest, asystole, in which all heart activity has stopped.

Even so, only 5% who got vasopressin made it home.

The results of the large European study are reported in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.

The finding should soon change international guidelines for treating people in cardiac arrest outside a hospital, said lead researcher Dr. Volker Wenzel, associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Leopold-Franzens University in Innsbruck, Austria.

Each year, more than 600,000 people die of sudden cardiac arrest in North America and Europe, usually because of a heart attack or a heart rhythm disturbance.