Cardiac arrest after hanging: A scoping review

Background: Hanging is a common cause of suicide and asphyxial cardiac arrest. There are few data to inform the treatment of cardiac arrest after hanging. We designed a scoping review to describe evidence relating to interventions and outcomes in patients with and without cardiac arrest after hanging.

Methods: Medline, Embase and Cochrane were searched from inception to 05/12/2024. Titles and abstracts were screened, and duplicates were removed. Articles were eligible for inclusion if they studied non-judicial hanging in adults or children, included cardiac arrest patients and provided functional or survival outcomes.

Results: The search retrieved 855 articles. One hundred and nineteen references underwent full-text review. Forty-five studies were included in the review. Studies were mainly from high-income countries and were all observational. There was variation in the terminology for hanging and in the outcomes reported. Survival with favourable functional outcome was rare in patients with cardiac arrest after hanging but was very common in patients without cardiac arrest. Cervical spine, airway and vascular injuries were rare. No studies identified interventions that were associated with improved survival following return of spontaneous circulation.

Conclusion: There are few data to inform treatment of patients with cardiac arrest after hanging. The available data suggest that cardiac arrest is a critical determinant of poor outcome following hanging. Further research should uniformly report outcomes of patients with cardiac arrest after hanging based on the Utstein template.