Remember the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever in which John Travolta struts through the streets of Brooklyn while the Bee Gees’ falsetto hit “Stayin’ Alive” pounds in the background? If you lived through the disco era, that song is permanently imbedded in the jukebox of your brain. The 1977 soundtrack album sold 30 million copies. To refresh your memory, see the video by clicking here.

So I thought it was brilliant when I heard that a researcher at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria was testing the catchy song as a training tool to help medical students and physicians perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) at the correct rhythm of 100 chest compressions per minute. (The song is almost exactly right on, with 103 beats per minute, is well known, and has the appropriate title to boot.) While it was just a small pilot study, the results, to be reported at the annual meeting of the American College of Emergency Physicians October 27-30 in Chicago, were promising.

The students and doctors practiced chest compressions while listening to the song. Even five weeks later, without the song playing, they got pretty close to the same rhythm. The participants also said they felt more confident about performing CPR after this training.

While more research is needed, this technique could help the 5 million who do CPR training every year develop more confidence in what they learned (as well as bring back the urge to jump up and do The Hustle!). More than 166,000 people in this country die from sudden cardiac arrest every year, according the American Red Cross. And 94 percent of them die before they ever reach a hospital. But thousands of lives could be saved if more people reacted immediately to perform CPR.

“Numerous studies have shown that CPR can make the difference between life and death when someone is in cardiac arrest,” says researcher David Matlock, MD, “but bystanders still hesitate to do it. If we can develop an easy way for people to remember the proper rhythm, that’s a great step toward encouraging bystanders to do CPR.”

To find CPR training in your area or see an online tutorial, check out the Red Cross website. For now, at least, you’ll have to provide your own recording of "Stayin’ Alive."