Boston Heart Diagnostics of Framingham, Mass., agreed on Dec. 9 to pay $26.67 million to resolve False Claims Act allegations suggesting it paid for patient referrals and improperly billed federal programs for lab testing, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced.

Life expectancy in the U.S. is lagging far behind that of other developed nations, according to a review published in the Journal of the American Medical Association—a phenomenon driven by an increase in drug overdoses, suicides and organ system diseases like CVD.

The widow of a 48-year-old man was awarded $6.3 million this week after her husband, who’d been cleared of CVD by his cardiologist six weeks before his death, suffered a fatal heart attack while jogging.

A report published in the European Heart Journal Dec. 10 suggests middle-income countries in Europe suffer most heavily from CVD morbidity and mortality.

The parents of a toddler who died two months after undergoing heart surgery at North Carolina Children’s Hospital are suing the Chapel Hill institution for failing to disclose issues within its pediatric heart surgery program.

A performance-related financial incentive scheme for general practitioners in the U.K. led to a nearly five-fold increase in the number of heart patients doctors said had been “cured” of atrial fibrillation, according to a recent analysis.

Worries about deportation could be contributing to worse heart health among Latina women in the U.S., according to work published Nov. 27 in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

One in eight adults with a history of CVD or stroke are noncompliant to their prescribed medications because of increasingly steep healthcare costs, researchers reported this month in Circulation.