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A procedure to inflate a balloon in the body's largest artery to temporarily send more blood to the heart and brain may help improve the low chance of survival (1 in 10) for people who experience cardiac arrest outside of the hospital, according to new, independent, preliminary late-breaking science presented Saturday at the American Heart Association's Resuscitation Science Symposium 2026 in Chicago.

"After cardiac arrest, people whose hearts cannot be restarted despite prolonged, high-quality resuscitation efforts, including CPR, breaths, use of an AED, medications and other techniques to restore the heartbeat, currently have very few treatment options and an extremely low chance of survival.

"Furthermore, survival and treatment options have not meaningfully increased in the last 50 years, so we need to do more in this area," said James Price, M.B.B.S., lead author of the study, who is a consultant emergency physician at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and consultant lead for research and development with the East Anglian Air Ambulance (EAAA) in Norwich, England.

During CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) after cardiac arrest, only a fraction of normal blood flow is restored to vital organs, and death occurs either because the heart has not restarted or the brain is lacking oxygenated blood.

For the current feasibility study, investigators borrowed a technique used for the emergency control of internal bleeding. Resuscitative endovascular balloon occlusion of the aorta (REBOA) is a minimally invasive procedure in which a small balloon is passed through an artery in the groin and inflated inside the aorta.

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