title: Metrics save lives: value and hurdles faced.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Affirmation of the importance of precision in fundamentals of resuscitation practices with improving neurologically intact survival from sudden cardiac arrest, correlated with both measurements of resuscitation metrics generically and recently further refined metric parameters specifically.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Quality of baseline cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in historic intervention trials may not be 'high quality' as once assumed. Optimal chest compression rates are within the narrow spectrum of 106-108/min for adults. Optimal ventilation rates remain within the 8-10/min range.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Although traditional CPR teaching of 'hard and fast' chest compressions has promoted a relatively easy to remember directive, the reality is that laypersons and medical professionals alike may unwittingly provide markedly suboptimal chest compression depths and rates. Prior resuscitation studies that focused upon airway adjuncts, defibrillation strategies, and/or pharmaceutical interventions that did not simultaneously gauge the underlying CPR chest compression rates, chest compression fraction of time, and ventilation rates should be cautiously interpreted in light of discovery that assumption of 'high-quality CPR' without measurement of the metrics of such is likely a faulty assumption.
authors.affiliation: aDepartment of Emergency Medicine, University of Oklahoma School of Community Medicine, Tulsa, Oklahoma bDepartment of Emergency Medicine cDepartment of Internal Medicine, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Dallas, Texas, USA.
authors.forename: Jeffrey M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Goodloe
authors.forename: Ahamed H
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Idris
mesh_terms: D016887:Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation; D004554:Electric Countershock; D006323:Heart Arrest / Q000628:therapy*; D006336:Heart Massage / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D011312:Pressure