'Staying Alive' Could Help You Stay Alive

By Tim State in News on Oct 19, 2008 1:43PM

[Disco] Revolutionary new research is dancing its way out of the University of Illinois medical school:

Dr. David Matlock, on the school's Peoria campus, has shown that the '70s Bee Gees hit, "Stayin' Alive" is, at 103 beats per minute, the perfect metronome for CPR.

Matlock had heard of a link between the tune and CPR. In 2006, Dr. Alson Inaba, an ER doctor in Honolulu, published findings of such a link in the Journal of Emergency Management.

Matlock's goal was to validate Inaba's observations. His study had subjects doing CPR on mannequins while listening to the song on iPods. Later, they did the same drill without the music.

The test showed that the song and the beat stuck in their heads, yielding compression rates within an acceptable range of the 100 per minute recommended by the American Heart Association.

Matlock will present his findings at the American College of Emergency Physicians meeting this week right here in Chicago. [Trib]

Photo by Sebastian Niedlich.