Disco Saves Lives: Give CPR to the The Beat of Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive”

What to do if some­one one around you goes into car­diac arrest? The Amer­i­can Heart Asso­ci­a­tion has two sim­ple tips. Over at their web site, they write: “If you see a teen or adult sud­den­ly col­lapse, call 9–1‑1 and push hard and fast in the cen­ter of the chest to the beat of the clas­sic dis­co song ‘Stayin’ Alive.’ CPR can more than dou­ble a per­son­’s chances of sur­vival, and ‘Stayin’ Alive’ has the right beat for Hands-Only CPR.” The song also has the right title for the job at hand.

To help spread the word, the AHA pro­duced a series of videos avail­able on YouTube, includ­ing this one star­ring Ken Jeong, an actor and come­di­an who is also a licensed physi­cian in Cal­i­for­nia. You may well rec­og­nize him from Judd Apa­tow’s film Knocked Up, where, like here, he exhorts peo­ple to “focus, pay atten­tion.”

Behind this schtick, there’s some real sci­ence. Accord­ing to NPR:

A study by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois Col­lege of Med­i­cine has found that the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” has the utter­ly per­fect beat for per­form­ing car­diopul­monary resus­ci­ta­tion. The 1977 dis­co hit con­tains 103 beats per minute. That’s close to the rec­om­mend­ed chest com­pres­sion rate of 100 beats every 60 sec­onds.

Below, you can find a very dif­fer­ent ver­sion of the same cam­paign that aired in the UK. And thanks to this ad cam­paign, at least one life was actu­al­ly saved.

Note: Anoth­er song to keep in mind in these life or death sit­u­a­tions is Queen’s “Anoth­er One Bites the Dust.” It has the right beat. But not so much the right title.

Demos for Hands-Only CPR can be found at the AHA web site.

via Metafil­ter