Background:

In patients with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), care requirements can conflict with the need to promptly focus efforts on organ donation in patients who are pronounced dead.

Objective:

To evaluate objective criteria for identifying patients with OHCA with no chance of survival during the first minutes of cardiopulmonary resuscitation to enable prompt orientation toward organ donation.

Design:

Retrospective assessment using OHCA data from 2 registries and 1 trial.

Setting:

France (Paris Sudden Death Expertise Center [SDEC] prospective cohort [2011 to 2014] and PRESENCE multicenter cluster randomized trial [ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT01009606] [2009 to 2011]) and the United States (King County, Washington, prospective cohort [2006 to 2011]).

Patients:

1771 patients from the Paris SDEC 1-year cohort (2011 to 2012) and 5192 from the validation cohorts.

Measurements:

Evaluation of 3 objective criteria (OHCA not witnessed by emergency medical services personnel, nonshockable initial cardiac rhythm, and no return of spontaneous circulation before receipt of a third 1-mg dose of epinephrine), survival rate at hospital discharge among patients meeting these criteria, performance of the criteria, and number of patients eligible for organ donation.

Results:

In the Paris SDEC 1-year cohort, the survival rate among the 772 patients with OHCA who met the objective criteria was 0% (95% CI, 0.0% to 0.5%), with a specificity of 100% (CI, 97% to 100%) and a positive predictive value of 100% (CI, 99% to 100%). These results were verified in the validation cohorts. Ninety-five (12%) patients in the Paris SDEC 1-year cohort may have been eligible for organ donation.

Limitation:

Several patients had unknown outcomes.

Conclusion:

Three objective criteria enable the early identification of patients with OHCA with essentially no chance of survival and may help in decision making about the organ donation process.

Primary Funding Source:

French Ministry of Health.