Study calls for 'as soon as possible' treatment standard for heart attack patients

"Once in hospital, heart attack patients should be treated without delay to cut their risk of death, ideally within even less than the 90 minutes currently recommended by clinical guidelines, say researchers in a paper published on bmj.com today. After a heart attack, patients often undergo a procedure using a balloon-tipped catheter that is inserted into a main artery, pushed into the narrowed coronary artery, and inflated to clear the blockage. This is called primary percutaneous coronary intervention, or more simply balloon angioplasty. The time between a patient's arrival at hospital and first balloon inflation is known as the 'door-to-balloon time.' The current target is 90 minutes, but the benefits of reducing this time even further is still unclear. So researchers based in the United States set out to investigate the association between door-to-balloon time and deaths in hospital among patients undergoing balloon angioplasty after a heart attack." - Science Centric