Boston Heart Diagnostics has become the latest target in a federal investigation into possibly improper payments to physicians who send blood samples to labs to screen for heart disease, the Boston Globe reported. The Department of Justice initially investigated Health Diagnostic Laboratories in Virginia and is now expanding its inquiry to similar companies.

The National Lipid Association published recommendations that are designed to help fill the gaps in the 2013 cholesterol guidelines jointly released by two cardiology associations. The report aligns with some aspects of the guidelines but diverges on cholesterol targets.

To transport to hospital or not when an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest has no shockable rhythm was at the center of a debate published online Sept. 23 in BMJ.

Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest integrated health care system, will support the American Heart Association in a broad effort to improve blood pressure control for African-Americans in two U.S. cities over three years. The program will depend upon community-based efforts, as well as doctors and patients, to help decrease the burden of the so called “silent killer,” aiming to create a model that can be replicated in communities across the country.

New terms like non-ST-elevation acute coronary syndrome (NSTE-ACS) and a continuum view of unstable angina are a large part of the updated joint guidelines published Sept. 23 in Circulation. 

Integrating American Heart Association (AHA) telemetry guidelines into its electronic ordering system saved a healthcare system $4.8 million annually without compromising patient care, according to a study published online Sept. 22 in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Patients on statins had a 4.25 times greater 30-day survival rate following intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) than patients who were not on statins in a study published online Sept. 22 in JAMA: Neurology. Statin use also had a significant impact on whether or not patients were sent home or to a rehabilitation facility.

Checking off all of the boxes for a healthy lifestyle could reduce the risk of MI in men by as much as 86 percent. These findings were published Sept. 30 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.