Offering patients access to behind-the-counter drugs may increase usage; however, a study evaluating how access to behind-the-counter simvastatin in the U.K. affected utilization and pricing found that statin usage increased but expenditures did not. The study was published online Aug. 30 in Health Services Research.

A new meta-analysis has confirmed the effectiveness of technology-enhanced medical simulation in clinical trainingand the studys lead author, David A. Cook, MD, a medical-education specialist at Mayo Clinic, suggested in an interview that the time has come to stop proving the obvious. The analysis was published Sept. 7 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Use of an impedance threshold device (ITD) has been shown to enhance cardiac output during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR); however, a study published Sept. 1 in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that use of these devices may not improve survival among patients with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest who received standard CPR.

Extending the initial period of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients did not improve survival outcomes, according to a study published Sept. 1 in the New England Journal of Medicine. The results of the large, cluster-randomized trial may help settle a debate about brief vs. prolonged CPR by paramedics before the first analysis of cardiac rhythm, and bring clarity to current guidelines.

An analysis of reports of automated external defibrillator (AED) failures in which a patient died found that nearly half of the failures occurred during an attempt to charge and deliver a shock, and more than a fifth involved battery and power problems. But authors of the report, published Aug. 29 in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, cautioned that the federal databases limitations made calculating failure incidence rates problematic.

Patients who experience cardiac or respiratory arrest while in an intensive care unit (ICU) are at a higher risk of death if the cardiac arrest was due to pulseless electrical activity or asystole or if they were on CPR for a prolonged period, according to a study in the Aug. 15 issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal that tracked outcomes over five years. But ICU patients have better chances of surviving cardiac arrest than patients in non-ICU wards, researchers found. An accompanying editorial argued that the results identified survival to hospital discharge as a potential sweet spot for improving patient outcomes.

As hospital readmissions become a predictor of high-quality care at hospitals, Canadian researchers set out to find whether urgent readmissions can be avoided. Results of the study showed that the number of potentially avoidable readmissions was low. In fact, they were 16 percent of all readmissions, according to results published Aug. 22 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

A novel drug that is a cardiac myosin activator showed promising results in two clinical trials, according to studies published in the Aug. 20 issue of The Lancet. The drug, omecamtiv mecarbil, could provide a new treatment for certain heart failure (HF) patients, but an accompanying editorial emphasized that like any new agent, omecamtiv mecarbil needs to be rigorously tested in a randomized controlled clinical trial.