Home defibrillators now being sold on Amazon.com
August 31, 2017
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently cleared the HeartStart Home Defibrillator for sale without a prescription, making it the first and only defibrillator to obtain OTC status.
Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is a leading cause of death in the United States, claiming approximately 340,000 lives each year -- more than traffic accidents, house fires, handguns, breast cancer, prostate cancer and AIDS combined. Defibrillators provide treatment for ventricular fibrillation, the most common cause of SCA, by delivering a controlled electrical shock to restore a normal heart rhythm. For each minute that passes before defibrillation therapy is administered to a victim, the chance for survival decreases by about 10 percent. It takes an average of nine minutes for emergency professionals to reach a victim in a typical community.
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"These findings underscore the tremendous heterogeneity among Asian Americans, and the importance of looking at each Asian ethnic group separately," said Chen, who also serves as a Bush appointee to the President's Cancer Advisory Board. "California's large and diverse Asian population makes this state a logical and ideal place to understand the burden of cancer among Asian subgroups and Asians as a whole."
According to Chen, the increase in breast cancer seen in Asian American women may be due to increased awareness of breast cancer among Asian women and their physicians, as well as to Westernization, which Chen defines as "behaviors that are still difficult to quantify but represent qualitatively different actions than those in traditional Asia."
AANCART is the largest project ever undertaken to reduce cancer in Asian Americans. Headquartered at UC Davis, it includes researchers from seven other institutions: Harvard, Columbia, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, the University of Washington, UCLA, UC San Francisco and the University of Hawaii.
The 5th Asian Cancer Control Academy is sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, the U.S. Office of Minority Health, Region IX, AANCART, the California Department of Health Services, the American Cancer Society and UC Davis.
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