The most common cause of cardiac arrest in children is usually respiratory failure leading to hypoxia , rather than a primary heart problem.

Quick Scoop

In infants and young children, cardiac arrest typically starts with breathing problems (like severe asthma, choking, drowning, or respiratory infections) that cause low oxygen, which then leads to the heart stopping. In contrast, in older children and adolescents, congenital or inherited heart conditions (such as structural congenital heart disease and cardiomyopathies like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) are leading underlying cardiac causes of sudden cardiac arrest.

Put simply:

  • For exam-style questions and general pediatrics, the single best answer to “which is the most common cause of cardiac arrest in children?” is progressive respiratory failure (hypoxia).
  • Underlying heart disease (congenital heart defects, arrhythmias, cardiomyopathies) is very important, but overall less common than respiratory causes as the immediate trigger of arrest in the pediatric age group.

In pediatric life support teaching, you’ll often see it summarized as:
“Children arrest from the lungs, adults arrest from the heart ” — highlighting respiratory failure as the usual primary cause of cardiac arrest in children.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.