Moritz Haugk

Wiener Krankenanstaltenverbund, Hietzing Hospital · Emergency Department

Background: Resuscitation guidelines encourage the use of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) feedback devices implying better outcomes after sudden cardiac arrest. Whether effective continuous feedback could also be given verbally by a second rescuer ("human feedback") has not been investigated yet. We, therefore, compared the effect of human fee...

Mild therapeutic hypothermia proved to be beneficial when induced after cardiac arrest in humans. Prehospital cooling with i.v. fluids was associated with adverse side effects. Our primary objective was to compare time to target temperature of out-of hospital cardiac arrest patients cooled non-invasively either in the prehospital setting vs. the in...

Aim of the study: Evaluation of the treatment, epidemiology and outcome of cardiac arrest in the television franchise Star Trek. Methods: Retrospective cohort study of prospective events. Screening of all episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager for cardiac arrest events. Documentation was per...

Background: Efficiently performed basic life support (BLS) after cardiac arrest is proven to be effective. However, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is strenuous and rescuers' performance declines rapidly over time. Audio-visual feedback devices reporting CPR quality may prevent this decline. We aimed to investigate the effect of various CPR fe...

The aim of the study was to evaluate the epidemiology and outcome after cardiac arrest caused by intoxication. A retrospective analysis of 1991 to 2010 medical record of patients experiencing cardiac arrest caused by self-inflicted, intentional intoxication was performed. The setting was an emergency department of a tertiary care university hospita...

Aim of the study: Therapeutic hypothermia after cardiac arrest improves neurologic outcome. The temperature measured in the pulmonary artery is considered to best reflect core temperature, yet is limited by invasiveness. Recently a femoro-arterial thermodilution catheter (PiCCO-Pulse Contour Cardiac Output) has been introduced in clinical practice...

Aim of the study: Mild therapeutic hypothermia is a major advance in post-resuscitation-care. Some questions remain unclear regarding the time to initiate cooling and the time to achieve target temperature below 34 °C. We examined whether seasonal variability of outside temperature influences the body temperature of cardiac arrest victims, and if...

Feedback devices provide verbal and visual real-time information on cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) quality. Feedback devices can improve the quality of CPR during transportation. It remains unclear if feedback has an effect on the physical strain felt by providers during ongoing CPR. The objective was to assess the influence of real-time autom...

Mild therapeutic hypothermia (32-34°C) improves neurological recovery and reduces the risk of death in comatose survivors of cardiac arrest when the initial rhythm is ventricular fibrillation or pulseless ventricular tachycardia. The aim of the presented study was to investigate the effect of mild therapeutic hypothermia (32-34°C for 24h) on neurol...

The aim of this study was to study exercise-related cardiac arrests on the tennis court and investigate the impact of early initiation of cardiopulmonary resuscitation on survival rate and outcome. This study was based on the cardiac arrest registry of the Department of Emergency Medicine at the General Hospital Vienna in Austria. Between February...

Our purpose was to study whether the time to target temperature correlates with neurologic outcome in patients after cardiac arrest with restoration of spontaneous circulation treated with therapeutic mild hypothermia in an academic emergency department. Temperature data between April 1995 and June 2008 were collected from 588 patients and analyzed...

Body mass index (BMI) may influence the quality of cardiopulmonary resuscitation and may influence prognosis after cardiac arrest. To review the direct effect of obesity on outcome after cardiac arrest, the following cohort study was conducted. This study based on a cardiac arrest registry comprising all adult patients with cardiac arrest of non-tr...

The effectiveness and safety of non-invasive surface cooling was compared to invasive endovascular cooling in an animal model. Eight healthy pigs (29-38 kg) were cooled twice, starting in the first 4 pigs with unique surface cooling pads followed by endovascular cooling. In the second 4 pigs the order was reversed. The goal was to quickly lower pul...

To investigate if body temperature as measured with a prototype of a non-invasive continuous cerebral temperature sensor using the zero-heat-flow method to reflect the oesophageal temperature (core temperature) during mild therapeutic hypothermia after cardiac arrest. In patients over 18 years old with restoration of spontaneous circulation after c...

When treating patients with cardiac arrest with mild therapeutic hypothermia, a reliable and easy-to-use temperature probe is desirable. This study was conducted to investigate the accuracy and safety of tracheal temperature as a measurement of body temperature. Observational cohort study. Emergency department of a tertiary care university hospital...

Recently, a novel cooling pad was developed for rapid induction of mild hypothermia after cardiac arrest. The aim of this study was to evaluate the cooling efficacy of three different pad designs for in-hospital cooling. Included in this prospective interventional study were patients with esophageal temperature (Tes) > 34 degrees C on admission. Th...

Out-of-hospital induction of mild therapeutic hypothermia after cardiac arrest needs easy to use and accurate body temperature monitoring. The aim of the study was to evaluate the best temperature probe position on a specially designed tracheal tube, as compared to pulmonary artery temperature (Tpa) during cooling to mild hypothermia in pigs. Eight...

Automated verbal and visual feedback improves quality of resuscitation in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and was proven to increase short-term survival. Quality of resuscitation may be hampered in more difficult situations like emergency transportation. Currently there is no evidence if feedback devices can improve resuscitation quality during diff...

Purpose of the stud y: Early out-of-hospital induction of mild hypothermia after cardiac arrest needs an easy to use and accurate core temperature monitoring, which might be achievable with tracheal temperature measurement. The aim of the study was to evaluate which tracheal temperature site (Ttra) reflects best pulmonary artery temperature (Tpa) d...

Despite it being generally regarded as futile, patients are regularly brought to the emergency department with ongoing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Long-term outcome and its predictors in patients who were transported during ongoing CPR were evaluated in an observational study. Adult patients with non-traumatic cardiac arrest admitted to th...

To examine to what extent the type of emergency medical transportation influences the physical response of advanced life support providers. Providing external chest compression during resuscitation is physically exhausting. If the decision is made to bring the patient to a hospital undergoing resuscitation procedures, there are usually two options...

There is sufficient evidence that therapeutic hypothermia after non-traumatic cardiac arrest improves neurological outcome and reduces mortality. Many different invasive and non-invasive cooling devices are currently available. Our purpose was to show the efficacy, safety and feasibility using a non-invasive cooling device to control patient temper...

Transport of patients during resuscitation is a critical procedure. In both, ambulances and helicopters the quality of resuscitation is potentially hampered due to the movement of the vehicle and confined space. To date, however, no direct comparison of the quality of resuscitation at the scene, during a helicopter flight and in a moving ambulance...

Cold infusions have proved to be effective for induction of therapeutic hypothermia after cardiac arrest but so far have not been used for hypothermia maintenance. This study investigates if hypothermia can be induced and maintained by repetitive infusions of cold fluids and muscle relaxants. Patients were eligible, if they had a cardiac arrest of...

Outcome after cardiac arrest is known to be influenced by immediate access to resuscitation. We aimed to analyse the location of arrest in relation to the prognostic value for outcome. Retrospective review from prospective databases (ambulance routine documentation database and emergency department database on patients treated for cardiac arrest)....

The feasibility and acceptance of providing sudden cardiac arrest survivors with life supporting first aid training and automated external defibrillators (AEDs) at their homes is unknown. Preliminary experiences are reported here. Trained medical students provided life supporting first aid courses including AED training to cardiac arrest survivors....

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training is gaining more importance for medical students. There were many attempts to improve the basic life support (BLS) skills in medical students, some being rather successful, some less. We developed a new problem based learning curriculum, where students had to teach CPR to cardiac arrest survivors in order...

The aim was to assess the knowledge of life-supporting first-aid in both cardiac arrest survivors and relatives, and their willingness to have a semi-automatic external defibrillator in their homes and use it in an emergency. Cardiac arrest survivors, their families, friends, neighbours and co-workers were interviewed by medical students using prep...

The aim of the ReoPro-BRIDGING Austrian multi-centre study was to investigate the effects of abciximab (ReoPro) on early reperfusion in ST-elevation myocardial infarction prior to or during primary percutaneous coronary angioplasty (pPCI). Fifty-five patients with STEMI were randomized either to start abciximab (0.25 mg/kg bolus followed by 10 micr...

In general automated external defibrillators (AED) are handled easily, but some untrained lay rescuers may have major problems with the use of such products. This may result in delayed shock delivery and delay in basic life support (BLS) after use of the AED. To study the effect of voice prompts and design solutions we tested the time from the firs...