To resuscitate someone who has suffered a cardiac arrest, you need to make between 90 and 100 chest compressions per minute, and, according to a new study in the BMJ, running through the song Nellie the Elephant in your head while you do it significantly helps. Unfortunately, the team of researchers, led by Malcolm Woollard, professor in pre- hospital and emergency care at Coventry University, also found the song distracted people from maintaining an adequate depth of compression (equally important as speed) and so doesn't recommend that first aid trainers use the song to teach CPR.

The use of music in CPR is something that has taken hold – Nellie the Elephant is popular, others include the Bee Gees' Stayin' Alive, and the Archers theme tune, which have similarly galloping tempos. I thought Woollard was being funny when he said they were also looking at other songs such as Billy Ray Cyrus's Achy Breaky Heart, but it turns out he has already studied this; the results are yet to be published, but he found that compression rates and depths for this 123-beats-per-minute song were good. I'm not sure – if someone was singing this while attempting to revive me, I might view death as the better option. "Yes, people may lose their will to live," says Woollard with a laugh.

"The serious message is: learn how to do CPR," he says. "One of the most important predictors of survival [if you have a cardiac arrest] is whether there is someone around who is prepared to do CPR. Bad CPR is better than no CPR, but ideally people should do classes and learn how to do it properly."