A new cardiopulmonary resuscitation method using only rhythmic abdominal compression: a preliminary report.

This article introduces 2 new cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) concepts: (1) the use of only rhythmic abdominal compression (OAC) to produce blood flow during CPR with ventricular fibrillation and (2) a new way of describing coronary perfusion effectiveness, namely, the area between the aortic and right atrial pressure curves, summed over 1 minute, the units being millimeters of mercury per second. We call this unit the coronary perfusion index (CPI). True mean coronary perfusion pressure is CPI/60. We also relate CPI during CPR with ventricular fibrillation to the CPI for the normally beating heart in the same animal, obtained before each experiment. This 11-pig (25-35 kg) study compares the CPI for standard chest-compression CPR and that obtained with OAC-CPR. The coronary perfusion ratio for OAC-CPR compared with standard chest-compression CPR was 1.6 +/- 0.73 (P = .024). In other words, OAC-CPR produced 60% more coronary perfusion than standard chest-compression CPR, with no damage to visceral organs.