Assessing the impact of prehospital intubation on survival in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

Unlabelled: There is a developing body of literature documenting adverse survival outcome of out-of-hospital endotracheal intubation for critical multiple trauma and head injury patients.

Objective: To compare the rates of survival to hospital admission and discharge of nontraumatic out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients who received successful out-of-hospital endotracheal intubation and those who were not intubated.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective analysis from an ongoing database of OHCA patients brought to a large suburban tertiary care emergency department by paramedic services between 1995 and 2006.