What Is Asystole And Why Is It Bad?
Asystole is the medical term that is commonly called flatline.
Flatline means that there is no cardiac electrical movement. During
flatline, the myocardium does not produce any contractions and provides
no blood flow or cardiac output. The myocardium is the center of the 3
layers that form the heart’s wall. Medical physicians require a state of
asystole to certify that an individual is dead.
Patients that exhibit signs of asystole are usually treated with chest compressions and injections of atropine, epinephrine or vasopressin. During asystole, electrical shocks (defibrillation), will typically have no affect on the heart since it has already become depolarized. Defibrillation comprises of applying a medicinal amount of electrical shock to a stricken heart through a defibrillator by an ECG technician or another medical professional.
A defibrillator stops the heart from beating by depolarizing a large portion of the heart muscle. Before asystole occurs, the normal heart rhythm can be revived. After applying a defibrillator, the natural pacemaker chemicals in the sinoatrial node within the heart can restart the heartbeat.
There are a few emergency room doctors that believe in using defibrillation even after seeing the signs of asystole. They suggest that defibrillation should be applied because the lack of heartbeat may really be an uneven contraction of the heart muscle inside the chambers of the heart. This type of contraction is also known as ventricular fibrillation and makes the heart muscle quiver like a can full of worms.
While it may be true that ventricular fibrillation may be hard to distinguish from asystole, there is still not a lot of evidence to back up this practice. The majority of doctors believe that asystole is a verification of death and not an uneven heart rate. ECG/EKG training usually defines asystole as a medical confirmation of death. When another cause is detected for the absence of a heartbeat and is treated immediately, a small percentage of patients are brought back to life.
An ECG technician will analyze the patient’s heart rhythm to check for a cardiac arrhythmia and a ventricular fibrillation heart condition. A cardiac arrhythmia happens whenever there is unusual electrical activity within the heart such as being too slow, too fast or extremely irregular.
ECG technicians are required to learn this detailed knowledge through ECG/EKG classes to earn their ECG/EKG certification.
You will find ECG technicians with ECG/EKG certification working in hospital emergency rooms, high-risk industrial facilities, nursing homes, cardiologist offices or working one-on-one with patients. Their ECG/EKG training includes working under supervision at a medical facility and taking ECG/EKG classes in:
There is a growing demand for medical professionals that can work with asystole conditions, defibrillators and ECG/EKG devices because of the large population of baby boomers that are now in their 60s.