Background. This study evaluated a potential correlation between patient age, body weight and survival from prehospital cardiac arrest, as a secondary endpoint in a study evaluating the effect of bicarbonate on survival. Design. A prospective, randomized, double-blinded clinical intervention trial. Methods. 874 prehospital cardiopulmonary arrest patients in a prehospital urban, suburban, and ru...

BACKGROUND When health care practitioners assist patients with decisions about advance directives, the risks and benefits of resuscitation options are often discussed. Whether practitioners have accurate perceptions about in-hospital resuscitation success rates is not known, nor is the effect of patient age on these perceptions. Age on its own has not been definitively associated with decreased...

Amiodarone is an antiarrhythmic drug indicated in the treatment of ventricular arrhythmias. Early studies evaluating amiodarone for the management of ventricular arrhythmias demonstrated the efficacy of amiodarone in patients who were refractory to treatment with multiple antiarrhythmic drugs. More recently, 2 major trials, published in 1999 and 2002, described the efficacy of amiodarone as a p...

Despite the substantial number of multi-agent systems that use an Agent Communication Language (ACL) the dust has not settled yet over the landscape of ACLs. The semantic specification issues have monopolized the debate at the expense of other important pragmatic issues that must be adequately resolved in the immediate future if ACLs are going to support the development of robust agent systems....

Interoperability is a central issue for both the mobile agents community and the wider agents community. Unfortunately, the interoperability concerns are different between the two communities. As a result, inter-agent communication is an issue that has been addressed in a limited manner by the mobile agents community. Agent communication languages (ACLs) have been developed as tools with the ca...