Man goes without pulse for 96 minutes — and lives

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A 54-year-old man who collapsed and was without a pulse for 96 minutes was successfully resuscitated and shows no neurological symptoms or other consequences of the hour and a half he spent as a dead man, the Mayo Clinic reported.

Emergency workers used defibrillators and CPR on the man, who had suffered cardiac arrest. Emergency workers used technology called capnography, which measures how much blood is traveling to the lungs and other organs. By seeing how much blood was still flowing through the body, EMTs could keep trying to revive the man.

“A pulse gradually returned,” anesthesiologist and cardiac care specialist Dr. Roger White wrote in the paper describing the incident. “The effort was successful in large part because of capnography, which informed emergency workers that if they persisted, it was conceivable they’d have a survivor on their hands.”

White said that this was the longest-known period of pulselessness that has ended in “a good outcome,” and used the case as an argument for more use and study of capnography.