ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, September 13, 1996 TAG: 9609130157
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
The government has approved smaller, cheaper machines that can shock a stopped heart into beating again, a move that could help make the devices as common as first-aid kits.
Experts say a third of the 300,000 Americans who die of cardiac arrest every year might be saved if emergency workers had delivered an electrical shock to restart the heart during the critical first minutes.
Paramedics carry defibrillators to do that, but the machines are so bulky, complicated and expensive that most police officers and firefighters - typically the first to respond to emergencies - don't carry them, costing precious time in treatment.
Cardiologists are demanding smaller, more affordable defibrillators that every emergency worker could carry as easily as a fire extinguisher or first-aid kit.
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the first in a new wave of such units, Heartstream Inc.'s ForeRunner.
About the size of a book, it weighs just 4 pounds, half the weight of the smallest unit now available. It will cost between $3,000 and $4,000, somewhat cheaper than the $5,000 to $7,500 price tags common for today's defibrillators.
And unlike older competitors, ForeRunner has a computer screen that automatically analyzes and displays the patient's heart rhythm so emergency workers can see how well the person is responding to the shocks.
ForeRunner ``has some very definite advantages,'' said Dr. Roger White of the Mayo Clinic, who led a campaign to put defibrillators in the police cars in the clinic's hometown of Rochester, Minn., a move that gave the city the nation's highest survival rate for cardiac arrest.
Cardiac arrest is not a heart attack; it's worse: The electrical signals that tell the muscles to pump go haywire, so the heart actually stops. Victims pass out almost immediately and the average survival rate is just 5 percent.
``If you defibrillate early, you can have high survival rates, and it's the only thing that works,'' explained Alan Levy, president of Seattle-based Heartstream.
That's where easy-to-carry defibrillators come in. Less than 25 percent of all emergency response vehicles and less than 1 percent of police cars carry the machines.
But when Rochester put defibrillators in 12 police cars, the survival rate rose to 50 percent. In contrast, Levy said, survival is just 1 percent in New York City, as ambulance workers battle traffic and slow elevators, taking on average 15 to 20 minutes just to get to the victim.
Anyone with the minimum training required for emergency work can master ForeRunner, Levy said. Voice prompts and a computer screen instruct the user in each step - the chest paddles even are diagrammed to show exactly where to place them.
A computer chip acts somewhat like an airplane's ``black box,'' recording the patient's heart rhythm as well as everything the emergency workers say so doctors have a complete record of how the patient reacted.
And Heartstream uses a type of electric wave - now standard in implantable defibrillators but not yet found in any portable competitor - that requires less energy, making the machine smaller and allowing more than 100 shocks before replacing the batteries, Levy said.
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. The ForeRunner heart defibrillator, shown sittingby CNBatop older defibrillators, is so small and easy to use,
cardiologists say it may one day be as common as the standard fire
extinguisher.