Invasive coronary strategy found helpful in surviving heart attack

Emobileclinic Researchers Corner 

One of the leading causes of sudden death is heart attack which can take any form ranging from heart failure, cardiac arrest to irregular heart beat. It has become a public health issue managing the patient who suffered heart attack.

However, respite is in the offing as a study funded by the British Heart Foundation, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has offered a lifeline to the management of heart attack.

 They are of the opinion  that an invasive procedures such as angioplasty, stents and bypass could enhance survival rate after such terrible heath condition of attack.
According to the study author, Dr Chris P.Gale, an associate professor and consultant cardiologist at the University of Leeds in England, the use of medication and having a healthy lifestyle play significant role in the management of heart attack. It is however, the increasing and wider usage of the invasive coronary strategy that reveals the details of the changes and improvement found among patients who survived heart attack in the ten years study.

The team observed a steady reduction in the death rate of people after a heart attack and this prompted them to embark on the study. The team analyzed information from a 2003-2013 database on about 400,000 heart attack patients with an average age of 73 years living in England and Wales. The team examined the treatments given to patients in relation to the survival rate six months after their heart attack.

It was discovered that the patients suffered a specific relatively milder form of heart attack known as non-STEMI attack.
A STEMI heart attack in the view of Dr Alfred Bove is “usually associated with pretty significant damage to the heart muscles which are better managed with angioplasty or bypass”. On the other hand, non-STEMI heart attacks which formed about half of heart attacks treated are somewhat less severe. This situation arises when the artery gets blocked, but the extent of damage is usually not quite to the same degree. He believes that, based on the new findings, even milder, non-STEMI heart attacks may warrant angioplasty, stenting or bypass in its management. The analysis further revealed that the six-month survival rate of British heart attack patients improved by about 3.2 percent yearly all through the study period which Gale’s team attributed to “increased and more widespread use of the invasive coronary strategy”. This feat has necessitated the international guidelines to encourage this type of “aggressive” intervention for heart attack patients across the board according to Gale.

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Gale noted “the positive effects of lifestyle, diet, exercise and cardiac rehabilitation have been shown for heart attack in many other studies, and Bove added that the mainstay of the patient’s care is still what we call optimal medical therapy that includes medications and lifestyle changes — managing high blood pressure, managing diabetes, managing cholesterol.

Bove stressed that “this data suggests the intervention probably has a little better outcome from the standpoint of survival than just pure medical [drug] therapy alone,” and said he think that the bottom line is for most practitioners to embrace the use of the intervention strategy.

Source
Health Day News



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