Hospitals Giving Faster Help to Heart Attack Victims

Shorter time between heart attack and treatment saves lives, researchers say.

ByABC News
August 22, 2011, 5:06 PM

Aug. 23, 2011— -- Michael Novella, 52, is grateful to be feeling good after having a heart attack last week. But he is more amazed by how quickly he got an emergency angioplasty at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

"It was less than 30 minutes, which is amazing," he said. "I would have been dead, there's no doubt in my mind. But they were pretty efficient."

Hospitals all over the country are getting faster at giving lifesaving angioplasties to patients who have heart attacks, according to a report published today in the American Heart Association's journal, Circulation.

The five-year study of more than 300,000 patients found that the average time it took for doctors to perform an angioplasty -- a procedure used to open a blocked or narrowed artery in the heart -- after a patient was admitted decreased from 96 minutes in 2005 to 64 minutes in 2010.

Doctors say that extra 30 minutes goes a long way toward helping a patient recover from a heart attack. During a heart attack, blocked blood vessels prevent the heart from getting the blood it needs to function.

Angioplasty opens the blood vessels -- often using a balloon passed through the narrowed locations which is then inflated -- and, if performed quickly, can keep the patient's heart from getting damaged by a lack of blood.

Harlan Krumholz, the study's lead author, called the results "medicine in one of its finest moments.

"Five years ago, people believed it was impossible to get this done in under 90 minutes," said Krumholz , whose colleagues at Yale-New Haven Hospital gave a patient an angioplasty in 16 minutes last week. "This study means that for any American who has a heart attack, you can feel confident that you're going to get the procedure you need quickly."