Do You Know How to Do CPR?

Picture this: A friend or family member grabs their chest, collapses right in front of you, gasps a few times and then lies deathly still. Would you know what to do if someone around you goes into cardiac arrest?

Of course, you would call 911 — most know to do that. But far too many folks then simply wait for help to arrive, says Dr. Benjamin S. Abella, adjunct professor in emergency medicine and director of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine Center for Resuscitation Science.

Instead, your next step should be starting cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) chest compressions if the person is unresponsive — yes, even if it’s been decades since you took a CPR class (or even if you’ve never been trained at all).  CPR should be used only when there are no signs of life, in terms of breathing and movement, says Jeffrey L. Pellegrino, an associate professor at the University of Akron’s College of Health & Human Sciences. 

Doing CPR immediately after cardiac arrest can double or triple someone’s chance of survival, according to the American Heart Association (AHA). “If you wait the 10 minutes for the ambulance to show up, it may be too late,” Abella says.

The good news is that CPR is a lot easier than it used to be. CPR has been around only since the 1960s. But the AHA has made constant tweaks and changes over the years based upon the latest research and data. Probably the biggest change came in 2008 when the association began recommending that untrained bystanders skip mouth-to-mouth ventilation and do only high-quality chest compressions — known as hands-only CPR — when an adult collapses.“

The old way was too complex,” says Dr. Bentley J. Bobrow, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at UTHealth Houston McGovern Medical School, who helped write the new guidelines. “When people are panicking, it’s hard to remember anything. We tried to make CPR as easy as possible in the hope that more people will be able and willing to do it.”

About 350,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occur each year in the U.S. According to AHA data, 41.7 percent of people with cardiac arrest received CPR by a bystander, which is someone with little to no training.  In fact, bystander CPR was linked with a 24 percent higher likelihood of surviving to hospital discharge in older adults compared with no CPR. The survival benefit was similar in those 65 and up, according to a 2023 report in JACC: Advances.

Often, people don’t start CPR because they worry about hurting someone or doing it wrong. But the latest research shows that it is very difficult to cause harm through CPR, even if the person doesn’t need it. “The only real way to do it wrong is to not try to do it,” Abella says.

How to Do CPR

If you want to brush up so you can feel confident in the event of an emergency, here are five big changes you need to know about.

Don’t wait. Previously, the AHA recommended “looking, listening and feeling” for breathing or pulse before starting CPR. But that was wasting too much time, Bobrow says. A victim’s chance of survival falls 7 to 10 percent for every minute you delay. So the current guidelines advise calling 911 and starting compressions immediately on someone who is unresponsive and not breathing normally. “If it turns out they are not in cardiac arrest — say they’re drunk or they fainted — they will probably just push your hand away. No harm, no foul,” Bobrow says.