With an alarming rise in the number of prescriptions filled for non-benzo sleeping/z-drugs and anti-epilepsy gabapentinoids over the last two decades, researchers aimed to fill in the gap in knowledge in the proportion of overdose deaths involving those medications. They found that overdose deaths involving these drugs increased more than three-fold between 2000 and 2018. Until now there was little data on overdose deaths involving non-benzodiazepines and gabapentinoids.

A new study found that veterans transported by ambulance to VA hospitals had better 30-day survival rates than veterans transported to non-VA hospitals. The survival advantage was greater for Black and Hispanic patients and for patients with a history of receiving care at the hospital to which they were taken.

Researchers at Michigan Medicine have developed a novel method of measuring growth in the aorta that may help clinicians to identify potentially fatal heart conditions earlier. The technique, called vascular deformation mapping, measures changes in the thoracic aorta by using high-resolution CT imaging to calculate three-dimensional changes in the aortic wall. In the study, VDM significantly outperformed the standard manual rating methods performed by experts.