Nearly six million Americans currently live with heart failure, yet a recent national survey found potentially dangerous misconceptions and knowledge gaps about the disease. In fact, nearly half of those surveyed got fundamental facts about heart failure wrong and two-thirds of respondents confused signs of heart failure with signs of a heart attack.

An experimental, inexpensive iPhone application transmitted diagnostic heart images faster and more reliably than emailing photo images, according to a research study presented at the American Heart Association’s Quality of Care and Outcomes Research Scientific Sessions 2013.

The mismatch between where cardiac arrest is most likely to happen and where automated external defibrillators (AEDS) are most likely placed may help explain in part the low survival rate for this “significant public health problem,” according to a Canadian study published yesterday online in Annals of Emergency Medicine (“Determining Risk for Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest by Location Type in a Canadian Urban Setting to Guide Future Public Access Defibrillator Placement”).

High pressure jobs with heavy workloads, tight deadlines and restricted decision-making create significant cardiac risk in the people who hold them, according to research published in the medical journal Lancet.