A large percentage of patients hospitalized for heart failure at Yale-New Haven hospital had symptoms such as anxiety and pain that are typically not associated with the condition, according to a prospective study. The researchers also found that patients often did not have improvements in symptom severity after getting discharged.

After a mean follow-up of 13 years, Swedish men who had moderate levels of physical activity had a lower risk of heart failure compared with those who had high or low activity levels, according to a population-based cohort study.

For patients with type 2 diabetes and stable ischemic heart disease, measuring their cardiac troponin T concentration may help predict their risk of death from cardiovascular causes, nonfatal MI or nonfatal stroke, according to an analysis of a randomized study.

The American College of Cardiology (ACC) announced it plans on launching two clinical registry programs to track outcomes in patients with atrial fibrillation. The registries will be part of the National Cardiovascular Data Registry, which currently includes eight cardiovascular data registries.

Fewer than one-third of hospital staff members accurately identified the percentage of patients who received intravenous tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) within 60 minutes of arriving at the institutions, according to an analysis of a national stroke registry. Personnel at low-performing hospitals tended to overestimate their performance in stroke care compared with other hospitals.

Factors associated with greater odds for a 30-day readmission included patient comorbidity, race/ethnicity, insurance status, a longer length of hospital stay and developing postoperative complications.

Patients with a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) who underwent an endovascular-first treatment strategy at Stanford University Medical Center had reductions in perioperative morbidity and mortality and improvements in long-term survival compared with those who had an open repair.

An analysis of eight surgical subspecialties at Johns Hopkins hospital found that more than 80 percent of the variability in 30-day readmissions was due to individual patient factors. The overall readmission rate was 13.2 percent, including 9.6 percent of patients who underwent cardiac surgery.