heart attack patients

(McGill University) Patients discontinuing statin medication following an acute myocardial infarction increase their risk of dying over the next year, say researchers at McGill University and the McGill University Health Center.

Their study was published in a recent issue of the European Heart Journal.

(Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) Researchers at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia have manipulated cell activity that occurs during the interruption of blood flow to strongly protect heart tissue in animal studies.

The finding has the potential to become an emergency treatment for heart attack patients, particularly since already existing drugs might be pressed into service to produce the protective effects.

(Columbia University Medical Center) A study led by Gregg W. Stone, M.D., professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center/NewYork-Presbyterian and chairman of the Cardiovascular Research Foundation, has shown that heart attack patients who were administered the direct thrombin inhibitor bivalirudin during primary angioplasty had a reduced rate of adverse clinical events, a lower rate of major bleeding, and a lower mortality rate than those who were treated with a regimen of heparin and glycoprotein IIb/IIIa inhibitors.

(Cardiovascular Research Foundation) The New England Journal of Medicine published results of the HORIZONS AMI trial which showed the use of the anticoagulant bivalirudin following angioplasty in heart attack patients reduced net adverse clinical events by 24 percent compared to the standard treatment, as well as reduced the risk of overall mortality by 33 percent and cardiac mortality by 38 percent.

Heart attack patients who arrive during regular business hours get better care than those who come during off-hours, but the difference doesn't affect in-hospital death rates.

Heart attack patients arriving at hospitals at night, weekends or holidays were slightly less likely to receive emergency angioplasty or receive it in a timely fashion.Death rates were similar for those arriving during regular and off-hours.

Data is of patients treated at hospitals using the American Heart Associations' Get With The Guidelines-Coronary Artery Disease quality improvement program.

Depressed heart attack patients have a higher risk for sudden death in the months following a heart attack. Now a team led by researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St.

Louis has found that the risk continues for many years.

Up to 20 percent of patients taking aspirin to lower the risk of suffering a second cerebrovascular event do not have an antiplatelet response from aspirin, the effect thought to produce the protective effect, researchers at the University at Buffalo have shown.