The good news: Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) is a hot topic in media around the USA — news is spreading quickly that SCA kills more than 350,000 Americans each year; the bad news: the media doesn’t understand what SCA is. Almost daily articles are written in the media inferring (or explicitly stating) that SCA is the same as a heart attack. What‘s worse, this fallacy is perpetuated by competitors on their websites and throughout their print collateral, which makes educating the public an interesting challenge.

An analogous (and also false) statement, which is far from perfect, is this: motor vehicle collision deaths are equivalent to trauma-related deaths. Yes, it is true that motor vehicle collision deaths make up a very large portion of traumatic deaths. However, it is not true that all traumatic deaths can be attributed to motor vehicle collisions; some traumatic deaths are caused by sports, violence, machine accidents, and a litany of other causes. Similarly, not all SCA's are caused by heart attacks.

You may ask, “Why does it matter what SCA really means? Isn’t the most important piece that awareness is being generated?” MasterCPR's emphatic answer is, ”NO.” So, why is this topic tremendously important and why do we emphatically answer “NO”?

This misconception, which so many to believe to be a matter of semantics, neglects to account for more than 100,000 people per year who are dying of non-heart-attack-related SCA, which, by the way, is still more people than die of breast cancer, prostate cancer, suicide, and HIV—all combined! Furthermore, SCA affects a larger cross-section of individuals including children, adults, men, woman, and people of all ages and sizes. The fact that Sudden Cardiac Arrest can be caused by a variety of other incidents is important since the definitive treatment for the heart rhythms that typically follow sudden cardiac arrest is defibrillation. When you fail to account for these other factors, you miss the chance to save up to 100,000 lives per year.

Here is a common scenario that arises when trying to make Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs) available for public use. A school district board vetoes the district nurse’s recommendation for an AED Program because they are not concerned that one of their children will need an AED, since children will not likely suffer from a “heart attack.” The board is clearly operating under the assumption that defibrillators save people that are having heart attacks. The fact is that thousands of children die of sudden cardiac arrest each year in the US.

What is a heart attack? A heart attack, or myocardial infarction, is when the heart muscle does not receive a sufficient amount of oxygenated blood, which is vital to keep that muscle alive and beating. The decreased amount of oxygenated blood is caused by a blocked blood vessel that feeds the heart and results in irreversible death of the muscle. This muscle death could certainly lead to an irregular heart rhythm and cardiac arrest, but it is important to remember that there are also other causes of cardiac arrest.

Sudden Cardiac Arrest, on the other hand, can be caused by a whole host of conditions including metabolic issues (such as imbalances in electrolytes), medication/illicit drug overdoses, congenital heart defects (both anatomical and electrophysiological), trauma or significant blood loss, blunt force trauma to the chest, lack of oxygen (caused by airway obstructions or respiratory problems), and many other regular and frequent injuries and illnesses.

The bottom line is that Sudden Cardiac Arrest and heart attacks are not synonymous. SCA is a sudden (without prolonged signs or symptoms), abrupt cessation of normal heart function where, typically, the heart enters a phase of quivering before completely stopping. The definitive treatment of this quivering (or fibrillation) is defibrillation, and the window of opportunity for this treatment is usually less than five minutes.