Heart Attack Treatment Speeds Up Nationwide

ByABC News
December 2, 2009, 10:33 PM

Dec. 3 -- WEDNESDAY, Dec. 2 (HealthDay News) -- A nationwide program to get faster treatment for people with the most severe kind of heart attack has dramatically reduced the time between hospital arrival and lifesaving angioplasty.

More than three-quarters of people with STEMI heart attacks -- so called because of the electrocardiogram pattern that shows major blockage of a heart artery -- were receiving artery-opening angioplasty within 90 minutes of reaching a hospital in 2008, said a report released online Wednesday in advance of print publication Dec. 15 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Before the campaign began, in 2005, only half of those patients met the 90-minute deadline recommended for emergency angioplasty.

"It is a remarkable leap in performance, a tangible improvement in how people are being treated around the country," said Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine and an author of the journal report.

When the American College of Cardiology and 38 partner organizations set up what is called the Door-to-Balloon (D2B) Alliance, there were doubts that it could succeed, Krumholz said. The name is based on the angioplasty procedure, in which a thin, balloon-tipped catheter is threaded into a blocked heart artery, and the balloon is expanded to restore blood flow.

"There were warnings that we were setting up a situation where we all could fail," Krumholz said. "But all of a sudden people were saying, 'We can do this.'"

The report on 831 hospitals showed the 90-minute door-to-balloon deadline for STEMI heart attacks being met in 52.5 percent of cases in 2005. That number increased to 76.4 percent of cases in 2008.

And the improvement has continued, said the American College of Cardiology. Its most recent data, from June 2009, shows 81.7 percent of patients getting 90-minute door-to-balloon time. Also, the average time for start of angioplasty decreased from 121 minutes in 2005 to 80 minutes in 2009.