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.