WEDNESDAY, July 9 (HealthDay News) -- Compared to CPR alone, adding extracorporeal life support doubles survival in hospital patients with cardiac arrest, says a study by researchers at the National Taiwan University Hospital.

Exciting news!

Dr. John T. McDevitt, a biochemist at the University of Texas at Austin, along with colleagues, has developed a saliva test that can determine whether a person has had a heart attack. This test can be administered anywhere, even in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, lessening the need to begin tests at a later time, and allowing cardiac care to begin much earlier.

It is the protein in the saliva that can determine a heart attack and once the saliva is placed in a lab card, it takes 15 minutes for analysis.

WEDNESDAY, April 16 (HealthDay News) -- Your chances for surviving a cardiac arrest are 13.4 percent worse if you are admitted to the hospital on the weekend versus a weekday, according to new research.

(LifeWire) -- Forty-five-year-old Mary Pakusch doesn't remember what happened in the minutes and hours after she went into sudden cardiac arrest at home on July 15, 2006. Her husband Paul does. Mostly, he remembers how scared he was. "She was living a perfectly normal life," says Paul, 47, who works at a Rochester, New York, television station.

TUESDAY, March 11 (HealthDay News) -- Cardiac arrest outside of the hospital can quickly turn deadly, but a new method of restarting stalled hearts might boost people's chances of survival, researchers say.