It's not quite the Internet sensation of Susan Boyle or the Old Spice guy, but a CPR video from the University of Arizona is quickly becoming a big YouTube hit.
The six-minute video, which shows a hands-only cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) method developed at the UA's Sarver Heart Center, averages about 45,000 views per day.
It features Sarver Heart Center director Dr. Gordon A. Ewy and Dr. Karl Kern, chairman of the Sarver Heart Center Resuscitation Research Group. The two physicians tell viewers how to respond if they witness sudden cardiac arrest.
"Our video is two gray-haired guys training on a very serious topic. There are no quirks about it, and we've had over 3 million views since April," Sarver Heart Center spokeswoman Katie Maass said Monday.
"It's been incredible. We've broken all the rules ... . We were told we needed something quirky and not more than two minutes long for it to go viral. But Dr. Ewy really believed it needed to be six minutes."
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Hands-only CPR, also known as continuous-chest-compression CPR, was developed at the Sarver Heart Center.
The technique has been credited with dramatically increasing survival rates and decreasing brain damage in adults rescued by paramedics after suffering sudden cardiac arrest. Additional data about the technique is expected to be released in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Sarver Center officials first put the video up on its website in April. After CNN ran a story on the hands-only CPR method this summer, views spiked so high that the UA embedded the YouTube video onto its site to reduce congestion on the server. By that point, the UA had already recorded nearly 1.2 million viewers of the video.
The YouTube video has added another 2 million views.
Maass has received e-mails from viewers from as far away as South America and the Philippines.
UA statistics show that most viewers of the video are men between the ages of 45 and 64. The video has been viewed on every continent. Seventy percent of the views are coming from the United States, 9 percent from Canada, and 5 percent from England and Australia, center officials say.
Ewy, who helped develop the method, says chest-compression CPR is more effective, safer and easier to learn than mouth-to-mouth in the event of sudden cardiac arrest. Ewy is traveling to India this week, where he will talk about hands-only CPR to medical professionals there.
Tune into azstarnet.com this afternoon for details on the Journal of the American Medical Association report on chest-compression CPR.
Contact reporter Stephanie Innes at sinnes@azstarnet.com or 573-4134.
