Use of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation for eCPR in the emergency room in patients with refractory out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

Despite our intention to select patients with potentially advantageous circumstances to achieve acceptable eCPR outcomes, the imminent deadly consequence of withholding eCPR obviously prompted individual physicians to perform the procedure also in presumably more unfavourable settings, resulting in similar mortality rates of eCPR as reported before.