Is Endotracheal Intubation PART Of The Reason For Poor Cardiac Arrest Survival?

If you’re an evidenced-based medicine advocate, you could be forgiven for being a bit confused about how to manage an airway in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (not that it’s any clearer in-hospital). The literature on this topic prior to this month was based mostly on retrospective studies that, while fine for hypothesis generation, didn’t shed much light on whether we should use endotracheal intubation (ETI) or a blind-insertion supraglottic airway (SGA). I summarized the state of that literature for EMS World here. I ended that article by mentioning two trials (PART and AIRWAYS-2) that were underway at the time that might answer this question. Well, they’re out now.

I’ve been reading and re-reading these studies since they published. I put my big nerd glasses on and dove into the supplements and data tables. I’d like to share some of my thoughts on them and try to make sense of how I’m going to incorporate their findings in my system. I’ll address PART, (Pragmatic Airway Resuscitation Trial), led by Dr. Henry Wang (@DrHenryWang)1in this post. I’ll address AIRWAYS-2,