Ormseth CH, et al. – In this study, researchers compared outcome among patients with cardiac arrest due to drug overdose (ODCA) and patients in whom cardiac arrest (CA) was due to another etiology. They hypothesized that patients with ODCA would have binary outcomes of either brain death or functional recovery. They analyzed 300 patients with CA, among which 28 had ODCA, with opioids accounting for 54%. ODCA was observed in patients who were younger and had fewer comorbidities. Further, these patients were less likely to have witnessed arrests or bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and had longer downtimes. Compared with non-ODCA patients, ODCA patients showed a higher likelihood of progressing to brain death despite similar neurological recovery and survival rates to hospital discharge.