New atrial fib guidelines

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 53, No. 3, April 2011, Page 134 News

The Canadian Cardiovascular Society (CCS) has released new guidelines to help reduce rates of stroke and hospitalization of patients with atrial fibrillation. The Canadian Cardiovascular Society Atrial Fibrillation Guidelines 2010 will help Canadian physicians bet­ter recognize and treat atrial fibrillation, which affects 250 000 Canadians. 

Published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, the guidelines contain many new recommendations, including:

• “Pill-in-pocket” therapy for patients with infrequent and longer-lasting atrial fibrillation. This would replace daily anti-arrhythmic therapy with a single drug dose.

• The goal of rhythm control therapy should be to improve patient symptoms and to improve quality of life, not to eliminate atrial fibrillation.

The CCS has also developed tools to help integrate these guidelines into clinical practice. These include an “app” (smart phone application) and a pocket card for physicians, to be available this spring.

The CCS Atrial Fibrillation Guide­lines 2010 are available at www.ccsguidelineprograms.ca.

. New atrial fib guidelines. BCMJ, Vol. 53, No. 3, April, 2011, Page(s) 134 - News.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply