Airports best place to be if your heart gives out

IT can be an incredibly stressful experience for many with packed airports, delays and endless security checks.

But Scots academics have found that flying may well be a life saver. A study of 70 international airports found they are one of the safest places on the planet outside of hospitals to have a heart attack.

The survival rate is almost five times greater in airports that in other out-of-hospital locations, the research has found.

And far from being lost in the holiday crowd, strangers can be life savers.

The speed of resuscitation and defibrillation, where an electric shock is used to restart a person’s heart, is crucial to a their recovery.

The study was co-authored by Dr David Fitzpatrick, senior lecturer in health sciences at the University of Stirling and Siobhán Masterson, of the out-ofhospital cardiac arrest strategy, for the Irish National Ambulance Service.

She said: ‘Airports may be big, but they are densely populated, busy, and primarily consist of public spaces, which greatly increases the chances of a person being discovered quickly upon collapse, and also increases the chances of someone providing assistance quickly.’

The study looked at 800 cardiac arrest cases at 70 international airports in nine countries over three years.

There were more than 3.3billion passengers, and an average of 1 incidents per airport. It took an average of eight minutes for people to get help.

The authors found that in airports, 32 per cent of patients survived an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

By the contrast, the number of Scots surviving out of hospital cardiac arrests was only 7.7 per cent last year.

‘Chance of being discovered’