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There have been fresh calls for restrictions on the sale of the painkiller ibuprofenafter another study found it heightens the risk of cardiac arrest. Taking the over-the-counter drug was associated with a 31% increased risk, researchers in Denmark found. Other medicines from the same group of painkillers, known as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), presented an even higher risk, according to the findings published on Wednesday in the European Heart Journal. Read More...

SAN DIEGO — Gasping patients in cardiac arrest tend to have better outcomes. This research finding was shared by Dr. Gordon Ewy at the Emergency Cardiovascular Care Update 2015. According to Ewy, while breathing comes from the brain, gasping comes from the brainstem. For patients in v-fib cardiac arrest, gasping starts around the two-minute mark, crescendoing in frequency, and then decrescendoing until stopping about five minutes into an arrest. For patients who had witnessed arrests, 55 percent were found to be gasping...

Most nursing home staff do not support performing cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on elderly residents who suffer sudden cardiac arrest, as most patients' health will not improve sufficiently for them to return to the facility, according to new research. While most nursing homes have policies to administer CPR, a survey of aged-care facility managers in Australia found fewer than one in five thought cardiac arrest patients should be revived if their hearts stopped. The results of the study carried out late last year and...

The drinks, which often contain large amounts of caffeine and other stimulants like taurine, raise blood pressure and could raise the chance of having an irregular heartbeat, a panel of doctors concluded after looking at results from seven studies. The US doctors said the evidence energy drinks raised blood pressure was “convincing and concerning”. Specifically, they found energy drinks raised systolic blood pressure by 3.5 points. It also lengthened a phase of the heart’s electrical cycle called the ‘QT interval’. Having a...

Bakersfield (Calif.) police are investigating a senior living facility over its handling of an 87-year-old woman who died after a staff member declined to perform CPR last week. A woman who identified herself as a nurse at Glenwood Gardens refused to give the woman CPR as directed by a Bakersfield fire dispatcher, saying that it was against the facility's policy for staff to do so, according to a 911 tape released by the Bakersfield Fire Department. Police are trying to "determine whether or not...

Outcomes for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest remain low, especially in ethnic neighborhoods, because educational messages about bystander CPR aren't getting through -- in part because they're not tailored to the audience receiving them, according to an advisory from the American Heart Association (AHA). Survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest vary geographically from 16% in Seattle to 0.2% in Detroit, according to the advisory, which was published in the Feb. 25 issue of Circulation. Bystanders provide CPR only 25% of the time, and 15%...

Lee Bowman, Scripps Howard News Service You see someone suddenly fall to the ground, unconscious on the street or at a park. A quick check of the pulse shows the heart's not beating. Now what? Of course, someone needs to call 911 for an ambulance. But odds are, the victim won't survive unless someone quickly starts performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Unfortunately, most people won't try.   Read full article...

Quick-thinking teachers save the life of healthy Boston girl, 6, whose heart stopped twice after warming up for gym class Olivia Quigley, has become a heart charity campaigner alongside her dad, Joe, pictured, after coming close to death at the age of 6 when she suffered two sudden heart attacks despite seeming perfectly healthy. She was actually carrying a fatal condition which causes the sudden death of thousands of children across America every year. Read more...

In the largest study conducted of in-hospital cardiac arrest among children, researchers analyzed records of 3,419 children at 328 U.S. and Canadian hospitals participating in the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines®-Resuscitation program from January 2000 -December 2009. The program is the only registry of its kind in the United States and is aimed at improving care and saving lives by tracking and analyzing resuscitation of in-hospital cardiac arrests. Nationally, 0.7 percent to 3 percent of hospitalized children suffer cardiac...

More -- and newer -- isn’t always better in medicine. We imagine it’s a good idea to pay for a whole-body CT scan so that every last defect in our body can be detected and treated promptly, so we subject ourselves to radiation but also to treatments for abnormalities that would never have harmed us. Or we assume that the latest drug off the block must be better than the old, tired ones, but that isn’t always so: An eight-year trial found...