Nearly a third of patients with misfiring or quivering hearts in U.S. hospitals do not get the life-saving defibrillator shocks they need within the critical first two minutes of cardiac arrest

The study confirming the importance of the two-minute period for survival was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which also ran an accompanying editorial indicating a person might be better off suffering cardiac arrest in a casino than a hospital.

Thirty-four percent of those studied lived to be discharged from the hospital. But in an editorial accompanying the study, Leslie Saxon of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles said that survival rate is disappointingly less than the 50 percent rate among people who collapse in an airport, casino or some other location