EMT Patient Assessment Practice Test

The main idea tested is how respiratory failure progresses if it isn’t treated. When the body can’t exchange gases adequately, ventilation fails and the patient loses the ability to breathe on their own. That transition is respiratory arrest—the stoppage of breathing. Without ventilation, oxygen delivery to tissues plummets and carbon dioxide builds up, rapidly endangering vital organs. If ventilation isn’t restored, this can progress toward cardiac arrest, but the defining immediate outcome of untreated respiratory failure is the cessation of breathing itself. Wheezing is just a sign of airway obstruction or irritation, not the end result of untreated failure. Oxygen toxicity relates to too much supplemental oxygen over time, not the natural course of respiratory failure. Cardiac arrest can follow after prolonged failure, but the question’s focus is the immediate consequence of the failure to ventilate, which is respiratory arrest.