In-hospital cardiac arrest: predictive factors and outcome

of the article. For this purpose, a clinical trial is defined as any research project that assigns human subjects prospectively to intervention or comparison groups to study the causeand-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Studies designed for other purposes, such as to study pharmacokinetics or major toxicity (e.g. phase I trials), and manikin or laboratory studies would be exempt. Further information can be found at www.icmje. org. Ethics and Patient Consent Work on human beings that is submitted to Resuscitation must comply with the principles laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki; Recommendations guiding physicians in biomedical research involving human subjects. Adopted by the 18th World Medical Assembly, Helsinki, Finland, June 1964, amended by the 29th World Medical Assembly, Tokyo, Japan, October 1975, the 35th World Medical Assembly, Venice, Italy, October 1983, and the 41st World Medical Assembly, Hong Kong, September 1989. The manuscript must contain a statement that the work has been approved by the appropriate ethical committees related to the institution(s) in which it was performed and that, where appropriate, subjects gave informed consent to the work. Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that a patient who is identifiable be shown the manuscript to be published. Authors should disclose to these patients whether any potential identifiable material might be available via the Internet as well as in print after publication. Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, however, and informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity. Studies involving experiments with animals must state that their care was in accordance with institution guidelines. Structure of papers Papers must comply with the word count and figure, table and reference limit listed above. All papers must include a separate title page documenting: authors' full names, academic and professional affiliations and complete addresses; the name and address of the corresponding author; the word count of the paper and the abstract (if applicable). Original papers, reviews and short papers must include an abstract of no longer than 250 words. This should be a structured abstract listing the aim of the study (or review), the methods (or 'data sources' for a review), the results and the conclusion. Commentaries must include a brief abstract of no more than 100 words that summarises the key points. Papers must be written concisely and conform to the style of Resuscitation. They should be clearly divided into sections: Introduction; Methods; Results; Discussion; Conclusions; Conflicts of Interest; Acknowledgments; References; Legends to figures. For review papers and commentaries use appropriate sub-headings instead of methods, results and discussion. Language All papers submitted to the Editor-in-Chief must use 'English' spelling e.g. haemodynamic, ischaemia, aetiology, oesophagus etc. Use generic names for all drugs. The term 'adrenaline' is preferred to 'epinephrine': for the first use only, 'adrenaline' should be followed by 'epinephrine' in brackets (parentheses). Similar arrangements apply to noradrenaline and norepinephrine. Resuscitation has an international readership: keep abbreviations to a minimum and confine as much as possible to those in regular use. Too many abbreviations make reading difficult. Abbreviations of units must conform to the International System of Units (SI), for example, kg, g, mg, cm, mm, ml, mg kg-1. Plurals have the same abbreviations as used for the singular. If non-regular abbreviations are used supply a list of these with their definitions as a footnote to page 1. Do not use abbreviations of this type in the Abstract. Supplementary data (including multimedia and video) The journal accepts electronic supplementary material to support and enhance your scientific research. Supplementary files allow the author to submit supporting applications, movies, animation sequences, high-resolution images, background datasets, sound clips and more, which will be published online alongside the electronic version of your article. In order to ensure that your submitted material is directly usable, please ensure that data is provided in one of the recommended file formats (for detailed guidance on formats for supplementary files go to http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/file_formats). Insert citations in superscript (after punctuation) and list the references on a separate sheet in numerical sequence in the order in which they are first mentioned in the text. References cited only in tables or figure legends are numbered in accordance with the sequences established by the first identification in the text of the particular figure or table. List all authors when there are six or less; when there are seven or more, list the first three, then 'et al'. Abbreviate the titles of journals according to the style used in Index Medicus. The list of journals can be found at http://www.nlm. nih.gov/tsd/serials/terms_cond. html. The following are sample references: Articles in Journals 1. Ross P, Nolan J, Hill E, Dawson J, Whimster F. The use of AEDs by police officers in the City of London. Resuscitation 2001;50:141-6. 2. Bernard SA, Gray TW, Buist MD, et al. Treatment of comatose survivors of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest with induced hypothermia. N Engl J Med 2002;346:557-63. Books 3. Armitage P. Statistical methods in medical research. London, Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1971. Chapters 4. Phillips SJ, Whisnant JP Hypertension and stroke. In Laragh JH, Brenner BM, editors. Hypertension: Pathophysiology, diagnosis, and management. 2nd ed. New York, Raven Press, 1995: 465-78. References to electronic publications Working Group of the Resuscitation Council (UK). Emergency treatment of anaphylactic reactions. Guidelines for healthcare providers. London, Resuscitation Council (UK), 2008. (Accessed 11 August 2008, at http://www.resus.org.uk/pages/reaction.pdf) Numbered references to personal communications, unpublished data or manuscripts either 'in preparation' or 'submitted for publication' are unacceptable. If essential, include this material at the appropriate place in the text. Illustrations must be in a form and condition suitable for reproduction. The illustration should bear the manuscript titles and be numbered in Arabic numerals according to the sequence of their appearance in the text, where they should be referred to as Fig. 1, Fig. 2, etc. Line-drawings should be drawn at least twice the size of their final intended appearance. Lettering should be clear and of adequate size to be legible after reduction. The extent of reduction will be determined by the publisher, but in general the same reduction will be applied to all figures in the same paper. Reproduction in colour is subject to approval by the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher. The extra costs of print colour reproduction will be charged to the author(s) although colour reproduction online is free of charge. Each illustration must have a legend that is typed with double spacing on a separate page and beginning with the number of the illustration they refer to. Tables of numerical data are typed (also with double-spacing) on a separate page, numbered in sequence in Arabic numerals (Table 1, 2, etc.) and provided with a heading, a legend, and referred to the text as Table 1, Table 2, etc. Elsevier has negotiated with several language editing companies to provide language editing services to our authors at competitive rates. Asia Science Editing, Diacritech Language Editing Services, Edanz Editing, International Science Editing, ScienceDocs Editing Services and SPI Publisher Services provide language and copy editing services globally to authors who would like assistance either before they submit an article for peer review or before it is accepted for publication. Statistical Methods * Use nonparametric methods to compare groups when the distribution of the dependent variable is not normal. * Use measures of uncertainty (e.g. confidence intervals) consistently. * Report two-sided P values except when one-sided tests are required by study design (e.g., non-inferiority trials). Report P values larger than 0.01 to two decimal places, those between 0.01 and 0.001 to three decimal places; report P values smaller than 0.001 as P<0.001. * All randomised controlled trials submitted for publication in Resuscitation should include a completed Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) flow chart. Please refer to the CONSORT statement website at http://www.consort-statement.org for more information. Funding body agreements and policies Elsevier has established agreements and developed policies to enable authors who publish in Elsevier journals to comply with potential manuscript archiving requirements as specified as conditions of their grant awards from the funding bodies: Arthritis Research Campaign (UK); Austrian Science Fund (FWF); British Heart Foundation (UK); BBSRC; Cancer Research (UK); Chief Scientist Office; Department of Health (UK);Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US); Medical Research Council (UK); National Institutes of Health (US); Telethon (Italy); Wellcome Trust (UK). To learn more about existing agreements and policies please visit http://www.elsevier. com/fundingbodies. Authors' rights As an author you (or your employer or institution) reta