ASS

Lidocaine has been the initial antiar-rhythmic drug treatment recommended for patients with ventricular fibrillation that is resistant to conver-sion by defibrillator shocks. We performed a ran-domized trial comparing intravenous lidocaine with intravenous amiodarone as an adjunct to defibrilla-tion in victims of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Methods Patients were enrolled if they had out-of-hospital ventricular fibrillation resistant to three shocks, intravenous epinephrine, and a further shock; or if they had recurrent ventricular fibrillation after initially successful defibrillation. They were random-ly assigned in a double-blind manner to receive in-travenous amiodarone plus lidocaine placebo or in-travenous lidocaine plus amiodarone placebo. The primary end point was the proportion of patients who survived to be admitted to the hospital