Highlights Of The 2020 American Heart Association (AHA) Guidelines for CPR and ECC

These Highlights summarize the key issues and changes in the 2020  American Heart Association (AHA) Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary  Resuscitation (CPR) and Emergency Cardiovascular Care (ECC). The 2020  Guidelines are a comprehensive revision of the AHA’s guidelines for  adult, pediatric, neonatal, resuscitation education science, and systems  of care topics. They have been developed for resuscitation providers  and AHA instructors to focus on the resuscitation science and guidelines  recommendations that are most significant or controversial, or those  that will result in changes in resuscitation training and practice, and  to provide the rationale for the recommendations.
Because this  publication is a summary, it does not reference the supporting published  studies and does not list Classes of Recommendation (COR) or Levels of  Evidence (LOE). For more detailed information and references, please  read the 2020 AHA Guidelines for CPR and ECC, including the Executive  Summary,1 published in Circulation in October 2020, and the detailed  summary of resuscitation science in the 2020 International Consensus on  CPR and ECC Science With Treatment Recommendations, developed by the  International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR) and published  simultaneously in Circulation2 and Resuscitation3 in October 2020. The  methods used by ILCOR to perform evidence evaluations4 and by the AHA to  translate these evidence evaluations into resuscitation guidelines5  have been published in detail.
The 2020 Guidelines use the most  recent version of the AHA definitions for the COR and LOE (Figure 1).  Overall, 491 specific recommendations are made for adult, pediatric, and  neonatal life support; resuscitation education science; and systems of  care. Of these recommendations, 161 are class 1 and 293 are class 2  recommendations (Figure 2). Additionally, 37 recommendations are class  3, including 19 for evidence of no benefit and 18 for evidence of harm.

Adult Basic and Advanced Life Support
Pediatric Basic and Advanced Life Support
Neonatal Life Support
Resuscitation Education Science
Systems of Care