A study published in the March 24th issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine suggests that heart patients who receive treatment at hosptials that participate in clinical trials may get better care, leading to a lower death rate and speedier recovery.

Dr. Sumit Majumdar, of the Univeristy of Alberta (Canada) and associates looked at data produced by the ongoing CRUSADE study, which gathers data from almost 500 US hospitals and currently represents almost 175,000 heart patients treated between 2001 and 2006. The researchers first broke the data down into patients who were treated at hospitals with:

• Many clinical trials
• Few clinical trials
• No clinical trials

When the data was examined, they found that heart patients had about a 3.5% chance of dying after a heart attack when treated at a hospital that ran many clinical trials, and a 5.9% chance when treated at a hospital that did not participate in any clinical trials.

Though research is ongoing, this is a trend that has surfaced in earlier studies. It likely reflects the fact that hospitals which participate in many clinical trials tend to be large academic medical centers, where standards of care and available resources are generally higher.