Many Heart Attack Patients Don't Get Best Emergency...(emergency angioplasty may save 12 to 20 ...),Health

The study involved patients who had a particular type of heart attack, called STEMI, for ST-elevated myocardial infarction. Emergency angioplasty is considered the best immediate treatment for STEMI. However, the study did not look specifically at the time that elapsed from the moment the STEMI patient arrived at the hospital to the time when the reperfusion treatment began. This is often called "door to balloon time" because of the use of tiny artery- opening balloons in the angioplasty procedure.

Hospitals around the nation, including U-M and Yale, are taking part in a national campaign to reduce this time interval for patients who receive emergency angioplasty, and studies have shown that patients who are treated within an hour or two of arrival at the hospital do better in the long term than those who wait longer for angioplasty.

But the fact that 10 percent of possible emergency angioplasty candidates still aren't even getting the procedure at all is a significant issue of its own, the authors say. Increasing its use in these patients could save up to an additional 30 lives for every 1,000 heart attack patients treated when performed in a timely manner.

In fact, the authors state that hospitals should be judged in part by their ability to deliver acute reperfusion to as many candidate patients as possible. "Our findings support the incorporation of a measure of reperfusion use into national quality improvement efforts," they write. An American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association task force has endorsed this same idea.

In the meantime, the study results again point to the importance of rapid response to heart-attack symptoms by individuals and their loved ones -- and the need to recognize that chest pain may not occur in everyone who has a heart attack.

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SOURCE University of Michigan Health System Copyright©2007 PR Newswire.

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