Many Heart Attack Patients Still Not Receiving Emergency Clot-Busting Treatment

In a report out Friday from the University of Michigan Health Center, the results of a new study show that many heart attack patients are not receiving needed emergency treatment, namely emergency angioplasty.

The study shows that there has been a large increase in the number of heart attack patients that do get the needed treatment, either angioplasty treatment or clot-busting drugs to re-open their clogged heart arteries but 10% of the patients who would benefit from the treatment do not get it and that translates to a lot of people.

The study also gives a reason why. Many of the patients who do not get the life saving treatment, do not exhibit the typical heart attack symptoms. Also, those who do not reach the hospital until six hours have passed since the on set of the heart attack, women, people over the age of 75 and non Caucasian ethnic groups are others who do not get the treatments.

The study took place over a 10-year period and the percentage of patients went down over the period from 20 to 10%, a significant improvement, which they attribute to the fact that the treatments are available on a wider scale in more medical facilities.

The study only involved patients who had a particular type of heart attack, called STEMI, for ST-elevated myocardial infarction. It is a type of heart attack that responds best to this type of treatment. One of the things that the study focused on was the amount of time that elapsed from the time the patient arrived at the hospital until the time they actually received the treatment.

Many of the top hospitals around the nation are participating in a campaign to shorten the time since the study has shown that those who get the treatments as fasts as possible, ideally within the first hour or two do better over the longer periods of time than those who have to wait longer. Increasing the use of the treatments in these patients could save 30 more lives out of every 1,000 heart attack sufferers, but only when it is performed as soon as possible.