Boston ? You don’t have to be Michael Jackson to have this problem: The odds of surviving cardiac arrest after getting CPR in a hospital are slim and have not improved in more than a decade, a big Medicare study concludes.

Only about 18 percent of such patients live long enough to leave the hospital, researchers found. Blacks fared worse than whites — a disparity only partly explained by more of them being treated in hospitals that did a poorer job of CPR.

Results were published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Lance Becker, a University of Pennsylvania emergency medicine specialist and an American Heart Association spokesman, called the findings “grim” and “a wake-up call that we need to redouble our efforts” to find better ways to treat cardiac arrest.

It occurs when the heart quivers or stops beating entirely, because of a heart attack, a sudden heart rhythm problem, a drug overdose or other cause.