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the most common phenomena that leads to that kind of heart activity without any actual pumping result is a ventricular fibrillation, which looks like this: http://www.ecglibrary.com/ecgs/VFNORWCH.gif, compared to a regular rhythm looking like http://www.grundkurs-ekg.de/definition/ekg1_neu.jpg. This is ( likely ) the underlying problem. What's described here is the fact that the medical personel was able to determine whether their actions ( CPR ) where effective enough to maintain blood circulation. there are, of course other metrics, like o2-saturation levels etc, but this one seems to be especially suitable.

One note aside, it's not uncommon for a resuscitation to go on for 1 or even 2 hours, it depends on the circumstances, the patient, the medical situation and most importantly, the timespan that elapsed before cpr was first administered, which was obviously quite fast in this example.




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