Radical New Heart Treatment Could Save Lives

Patients suffering heart attacks may soon have their arteries unblocked within hours, even before the attack is over, thanks to a procedure called primary angioplasty.

The radical treatment of heart attacks will mean that instead of patients being taken to A&E they would be taken to a specialist angioplasty unit which would need to be available 24 hours a day 365 days a year.

Angioplasty involves passing a catheter through an artery, usually via the groin, to the heart where a balloon is inflated in the blockage and thus opening the blood vessel. A stent is left in place to strengthen the artery walls.

Currently, patients are taken to the emergency unit and given drugs which dissolve blood clots, as soon as they are stable they are returned home and then are placed on a waiting list to have angioplasty procedure this can take several months depending on the particular Health Authority, around 50 thousand of these procedures carried out each year in the UK.

Under the new measures the balloon angioplasty would be given almost immediately to treat blocked heart arteries that are restricting the blood flow to the heart.

Initial research suggests that primary angioplasty is more successful than current drug treatment and could reduce deaths in patients who survive long enough to get to hospital by up to a half.

The British Heart Foundation, hopes that this method of treatment will become standard within five years.

The recommendations are that the patient would be diagnosed in the ambulance whilst en route having an electrocardiogram, be given oxygen, pain relief and a relaxant. Information would be relayed to the hospital, and on arrival the patient would go straight to the unit. The angioplasty would be carried out within 90 minutes when the patient is still in the process of having a heart attack.

Not only would this save lives but it is also very cost effective as the amount of drugs used would be considerably reduced.

Angioplasty has been used for decades and is taking over from the other established method, coronary by-pass surgery. Clot-busting drugs have been used with great success to improve the supply of blood to the heart after a heart attack, however the drugs do not work or are not effective enough in 40 per cent of patients.

Department of Health is investing £1 million and is in the process of drawing up a set of guidelines to assess results and run pilot projects to test how the treatment could work source Dept of Health