Objectives: To determine if end-tidal carbon dioxide (ETCO 2 ) is associated with chest compression (CC) quality in pediatric patients presenting with outof-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA).Methods: We conducted a retrospective, observational, video review-based study in a pediatric emergency department.Children <18 years with OHCA from March 2021 to August 2022 were included.We collected ETCO 2 values every 5 seconds via video review and CC data from an audiovisual defibrillator (Zoll R Series).CC data were evaluated in 1-minute epochs for compliance with American Heart Association (AHA) high-quality compression metrics for rate, depth, and CC fraction and categorized as low, marginal, adequate, or optimal.ETCO 2 was averaged over each minute, aligned with CC epochs, and analyzed using a linear mixed model.Results: Fifty patients presented with OHCA, and 30 were included yielding 380 total epochs.Compression quality was low in 35 epochs, marginal in 196 epochs, adequate in 139 epochs, and optimal in 10 epochs.There was no significant association between ETCO 2 and CC quality when comparing epoch categories.ETCO 2 had a weak positive correlation with target compression rate (r = 0.113, 95% CI 0.011, 0.213) but no significant correlation with target depth (r = -0.102,95% CI -0.202, 0.000) or chest compression fraction (CCF) (r = 0.055, 95% -0.046, 0.155).
Sahai et al. (2026) studied this question.