Association between therapeutic hypothermia and long-term quality of life in survivors of cardiac arrest: A systematic review

Objectives: Therapeutic hypothermia (TH) has increasingly become a part of the current standard of care for treating patients with cardiac arrest (CA). However, little is known regarding the association between TH and long-term quality of life (QoL) in adult survivors of CA. We conducted a systematic review to investigate the association between TH implementation and long-term QoL outcomes in adult survivors of CA following hospital discharge. Methods: We systematically searched MEDLINE and Cochrane databases to identify randomized and observational studies from January 2005 to January 2016 investigating the relationship between TH implementation immediately post-CA and long-term QoL in CA survivors post-hospital discharge. Results: We included 9 studies with a total of 801 patients. Six of these were prospective cohort studies, 2 were substudies of randomized controlled trials, and 1 was a retrospective cohort study. Six studies included patients only with out-of-hospital CA while 3 included patients with both in-hospital and out-of-hospital CA. There was marked between-study heterogeneity with respect to study population, TH implementation, and QoL assessment tool. TH was not associated with long-term QoL in this population. Conclusions: In this systematic review, the included studies do not suggest any association between TH implementation in CA with long-term QoL in CA survivors. Further larger scale studies are needed to investigate the sustainability of TH effects long term in this patient population. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.