There’s a new method of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) that raises blood flow through the heart by 25% more than today’s standard CPR method.

It’s called “only rhythmic abdominal compression,” or OAC-CPR.

OAC-CPR works by pushing on the patient’s abdomen instead of the chest. Best of all, there’s no need to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Developed by a biomedical engineer at Purdue University, this new technique may be more effective than conventional CPR, which has a success rate of only 5%-10%.

The Problems With Standard CPR

With standard CPR, the rescuer pushes on the patient’s chest and blows into his mouth twice for every 30 chest compressions.

But there are 3 major problems:

1. You risk breaking the patient’s ribs if you push too hard. But if you don’t push hard enough, the patient will die.
2. You also risk transferring infection with mouth-to-mouth breathing. One study showed that up to 45% of doctors and 80% of nurses refuse to do mouth-to-mouth.
3. Two people are needed to perform it properly. One person does mouth-to-mouth while the other does chest compressions.

OAC-CPR Eliminates These Problems

Instead of 2 breaths for every 30 chest compressions, OAC-CPR causes a breath for every abdominal compression.

This happens because pushing on the abdomen depresses the diaphragm toward the head, which expells air from the lungs.

Then the release of force on the abdomen causes the patient to inhale.

Abdominal compression also circulates blood through the heart by 25% more than standard CPR. This nourishes the heart with more oxygenated blood.

With conventional CPR, blood may flow in the wrong direction which brings de-oxygenated blood back into the heart.

OAC-CPR eliminates this backward flow.

The inventor of this new CPR method also created a wooden “pressure applicator” that looks like a small baseball home plate. It can be used to compress the abdomen without pushing on the patient’s ribs.

But a rescuer can use his hands if no applicator is available.

Until other researchers duplicate these results, the OAC-CPR method isn’t expected to gain widespread acceptance.