A Comparative Study Between a Pre-hospital and an In-hospital Circulatory Support Strategy (ECMO) in Refractory Cardiac Arrest (APACAR2)

Cardiac arrest (CA) affects approximately 40,000 people in France. It is still a major cause of death in a young population. Management of CA is defined by international recommendations, detailed by learned societies in each country. It includes several links that are interconnected for its optimisation. Despite all these improvements, no progress, or little has been made in the survival of CA victims over the past few years in industrialised countries, and the survival rate in France is 3% to 5%. Refractory cardiac arrest is defined as failure, after 30 minutes of specialised resuscitation. It used to be the standard to admit that there was no hope of spontaneous cardiac activity and satisfactory neurological recovery after this period, except in cases of CA with neuroprotection (intoxication, hypothermia). External circulatory support such as "extracorporeal membrane oxygenation" (ECMO) makes it possible to replace the circulatory activity of the myocardium and the respiratory activity of the lungs. In in-hospital cardiac arrest (CA) some teams use ECMO with an improvement in the survival rate of 20% in comparison to standard resuscitation. This use demonstrates the possibility of neurological recovery independent of the recovery of spontaneous cardiac activity which can be differed. These results encouraged the use of ECMOs in cases of out-of-hospital refractory cardiac arrests. Patients who are victims of CA are resuscitated for 30 minutes on the spot where the CA occurs. They are then transferred to a specialised centre. The significant improvement in survival noted in in-hospital CAs was not observed in the French series of studies concerning out-of-hospital CAs. This survival is currently estimated at 4%. This difference can be partly explained by the difference in time between the beginning of cardiac massage and the implementation of circulatory support by ECMO ("low flow" period). This time period is directly correlated to survival. To demonstrate the