It is possible that the public is putting defibrillators in schools rather than senior centers because society values the opportunity to prevent the death of a young person over the opportunity to prevent the death of an older person. Alternatively, people may not realize that cardiac arrests are more common in senior centers or health clubs than in high schools.

In theory, you want to put the defibrillators in places like senior centers where there are more cardiac arrests. Instead, we saw more defibrillators in schools. This practice may not be maximizing the numbers of lives that could be saved.

Where defibrillators should be placed, especially in a time of limited financial resources, involves an important debate.

Thus, intuitively, we would expect that there would be more defibrillators in senior centers than in schools.

It seemed counter-intuitive that defibrillators were being placed in high schools, where the population is relatively healthy and rates of cardiac arrest are low. We wanted to find out how common cardiac arrests were in high schools and how available defibrillators were.