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How many people have a near-death experience?

Between 4 and 23 out of every 100 people who survive cardiac arrest report a near-death experience, or NDE. The figure varies from study to study, because each study asks its questions in a different way, and of a different group of people.

After cardiac arrest
Between 4 and 23 out of every 100 survivors, depending on the study. In the most-cited one, 18 out of 100.
After more than a week in the ICU
15 out of 100, in a 2023 study in Belgium.
In the general population
Between 4 and 10 out of every 100 people say they have had one at some point in their lives.
The real figure
Unknown. No study asks everyone who survives.

A hundred people who survive cardiac arrest

For more than thirty years, several teams of doctors have been asking people who survive cardiac arrest what they remember. Some teams interview them in the hospital, a few days afterward. Others do it months later.

Imagine 100 of those people:

Each dot is one person. The 18 filled-in dots stand for 18 out of every 100 survivors. They are the ones who reported a near-death experience in the most-cited study. That study was published in 2001 and followed 344 people in ten hospitals in the Netherlands. Of those 344 people, 62 reported an NDE.

The other 82 people reported no NDE. Many remember nothing at all from the cardiac arrest.

What each study found

These are the hospital studies in our archive. All of them asked survivors of cardiac arrest:

Where and when People interviewed Reported an NDE
Vienna (Austria), 2023 · 126 people 126 4 out of 100
Southampton (England), 2001 · 63 people 63 6 out of 100
United Kingdom, United States, and Austria, 2014 · 101 people 101 9 out of 100
United States, 2003 · 116 people 116 10 out of 100
Netherlands, 2001 · 344 people 344 18 out of 100
Wales (UK), 2008 · 39 people 39 18 out of 100
United States and United Kingdom, 2023 · 28 people 28 21 out of 100
St. Louis (United States), 2002 · 30 people 30 23 out of 100

Studies with very few people give the least reliable figures. For example, the 2023 study from the United States and the United Kingdom interviewed only 28 people. With so few, one person more or less changes the figure by almost 4 out of 100.

Beyond cardiac arrest

  • In the ICU. At a hospital in Liège, Belgium, researchers asked everyone who left the ICU after more than seven days. Of 126 people, 19 had an NDE. That is 15 out of 100. Most had not had a cardiac arrest. NDEs were more common among people who had been sedated or on a ventilator than among the others.
  • In an ICU in Spain. At the Reina Sofía hospital in Murcia, a researcher asked the ICU patients she was able to talk with, whatever their illness. Of 170 patients, 10 described an NDE. That is about 6 in 100. More in the Murcia ICU study.
  • In the general population. In Germany, a survey asked a group of people chosen to represent the whole population. More than 4 out of 100 said they had had an NDE. Some of those people were not in danger of dying when they had it. Another survey, done online, asked 1,034 people from 35 countries. In that survey, 10 out of 100 described an experience that scored high enough on the scale researchers use. But people who answer a survey like that don’t represent the whole population. We cover it in the Kondziella survey.

Why no one knows the real figure

  • Only some survivors are asked. In the 2014 study, 330 people survived, but only 140 could be interviewed, and 101 reached the second interview. The rest died later, were too ill, or did not respond.
  • Most cardiac arrests are left out. These studies run in a handful of hospitals for a limited time. Outside them, no one keeps count.
  • It depends on how you ask. In Vienna, “near-death experiences” were never mentioned. The study was presented as research on memory. It produced the lowest figure, 4 out of 100. When people are asked about these experiences directly, the numbers may be higher.
  • It depends on what you count. If you count any memory from the cardiac arrest, you get more cases. If you use a strict scale, you get fewer. In Southampton in 2001, 7 of 63 people remembered something. But on the scale, only 4 qualified as an NDE.
  • Some people keep quiet. Among the accounts in our archive, at least 13 people say they did not talk about their experience for a while. They kept quiet because they were not believed, or because they were afraid of how others would react.
  • Some people may forget. In Vienna, some people were interviewed more than a year after their cardiac arrest.

Every study agrees that it is not rare. In all of them, some of the survivors report an NDE.

Frequently asked questions

Is it rare to have a near-death experience?

No. Between 4 and 23 out of every 100 cardiac arrest survivors report an NDE. The figure varies from study to study. And in surveys of the general population, between 4 and 10 out of every 100 people say they have had one at some point.

Why do some people have one and others don’t?

No one knows. The study from the Netherlands looked at how long the heart had stopped, medication, and religion. It found no clear link between these things and having an NDE. In the ICU in Liège, NDEs were more common among people who had been sedated than among the others.

Do you have to be close to death to have one?

Not always. In the ICU in Liège, most of the people who had one had not had a cardiac arrest. And in the German survey, many people had one without being close to death.

Keep reading

Where these figures come from

To start: