EMS World Magazine is the most authoritative source in the world for clinical and educational material designed to improve the delivery of prehospital emergency medical care.
Issue link: https://emsworld.epubxp.com/i/53080
NEWS NETWORK NOBODY LIKES A tie. People want clear winners and losers in their contests, with outcomes that are neat, clean and indisputable. But sometimes a draw can be a pretty positive thing. For ZOLL Medical Corp., that was the case with the CIRC trial, which compared out-of- hospital cardiac arrest survival among patients treated with traditional CPR and CPR using ZOLL's AutoPulse cardiac support pump, which automates compressions with a load-distributing band across the chest. At November's Resusci- tation Science Symposium, investigators reported equiv- alent results between the groups. That had been known since January 2011, when the board monitoring the trial's safety data shut down enrollment after concluding additional subjects couldn't change an outcome that, based on more than 4,200 patients, was already statisti- cally conclusive. "I will confess, when the trial ended enrollment and the outcome was statistically "Automating CPR frees humans to do other things." equivalent, we'd hoped for something better," says ZOLL President Jon Rennert. "But now I think of equivalence a little differently than I might have last January. What the trial really showed was that the AutoPulse was equivalent to probably the highest quality 14 FEBRUARY 2012 | EMSWORLD.com The data says a tie, but a tie with what? By John Erich, Associate Editor Man vs. Machine: Who Won the CIRC Trial? manual CPR ever recorded in a trial of this magnitude. We think that's a big deal, because CPR isn't performed very well in general." That's not just corpo- rate spin. The CIRC trial (for Circulation Improving Resuscitation Care; it was sponsored by ZOLL) had a unique design formulated to ensure the manual CPR against which the AutoPulse would be tested was of the highest caliber possible to obtain. To that end, trial designers incorporated some features: • All providers were trained in a standardized deployment strategy crafted to minimize hands-off time, then monitored for compli- ance during the trial; • A pretrial simulation study to ensure provider compliance with the trial protocol; • Three distinct trial phases (training, run-in, statistical inclusion) to reduce biases like the Hawthorne effect; • CPR monitoring using transthoracic impedance and accelerometer data; • To reduce selection bias, subjects were randomized after the decision to resusci- tate was made; • Use of the Group Sequen- tial Double Triangular test to determine superiority/inferi- ority/equivalence. "We wanted to make sure we set the bar high for the control arm," says Rennert. "We put a lot of measures in place to ensure the quality of the CPR was monitored religiously, and that feedback was provided after every case to each of the rescuing paramedics. It required an enormous investment of time and training and record- keeping and analysis to get the manual CPR quality as high as it was." It was worth it, though: Overall, the all-comers survival rate it achieved might be the highest ever recorded in a trial of this magnitude. Full results will be published in 2012, but it appears CIRC emphati- cally reinforces the value of good CPR; both arms had CPR fractions of an impres- sive 80%-plus over the fi rst 20 minutes. Says Rennert: "We think it's pretty clear that's what drove the higher survival." The CIRC trial began in 2007 with sites in the U.S., Austria and the Netherlands, and involved deployment of more than 500 AutoPulses and training of more than 5,000 medics to use them. Its design was fully described in the journal Resuscita- tion in 2010.1 The authors of that piece, led by Brooke Lerner, PhD, of the Medical College of Wisconsin, noted confl icting results among previous human prehospital AutoPulse studies, and their desire to address "method- ological issues that may have infl uenced [those] results." One of those instances may have been the ASPIRE (AutoPulse Assisted Prehos- pital International Resuscita- tion) trial, which was stopped early in 2005 when no differ- ence was found in survival to four hours, but survival to and cerebral performance at hospital discharge were worse among the AutoPulse group.2 A potential queering factor was recognized later: One trial site changed proto- cols midstream, resulting