Browse News Releases for Scientific Statements/Guidelines

Statement Highlights: The American Heart Association urges healthcare providers to use feedback from patient surveys to personalize care. Patient surveys can help reveal depression, which can significantly worsen cardiovascular health, but is often underdiagnosed despite being common among cardiovascular patients.

Statement Highlights: People born with a heart defect need physical activity. Some irregular heart beat conditions may require activity restrictions but for most patients physical activity is unlimited.

Statement Highlights: Alternative therapies such as aerobic exercise, resistance or strength training and isometric hand grip exercises could help people reduce blood pressure. Biofeedback and device-guided slow breathing reduced blood pressure a small amount. Due to their modest effects, alternative therapies can be used with — not as a replacement for — standard treatment.

Statement Highlights: The American Heart Association has compiled recommendations for policy makers and advocates to improve cardiovascular health at the community level. The guide focuses on community interventions to change behaviors such as smoking, physical inactivity and unhealthy eating habits.

Statement Highlights: Targeting CPR education in high-risk neighborhoods could improve cardiac arrest survival rates. Survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest vary widely in the United States, from the lowest of 0.2 percent in Detroit to a high of 16 percent in Seattle. Survival rates are influenced in part by bystanders’ willingness to do CPR.

Guideline Highlights: Clot-dissolving therapy should be administered to people having acute ischemic stroke within 60 minutes of hospital arrival. The window for clot-dissolving therapy may be extended to 4.5 hours from the start of symptoms for carefully selected patients. Quality improvement programs addressing stroke care should be organized in all stroke centers. The new recommendations replace guidelines issued in 2007.

Guidelines Highlights: New streamlined guidelines will help healthcare providers better treat patients with the most severe form of heart attack known as STEMI. Coronary intervention with balloon angioplasty and stents is the preferred treatment...

Statement Highlights: Social media may be an effective way to help children overcome obesity. Parental involvement and online interaction with counselors and peers led to greater success for overweight and obese children and teens in some...

Statement Highlights   Measuring the ankle-brachial index (ABI) is a non-invasive way to diagnose peripheral artery disease and detect people at increased risk of cardiovascular disease. ABI is the ratio of the top number in a blood pressure...

Statement highlight: Because depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder are common among people with implanted cardioverter defibrillators, doctors and nurses should provide gender- and age-specific information on the potential...