Better Treatment After a Heart Attack

I like to focus on preventative medicine whenever possible. It’s always better to catch a disease in its early stages and do as much as possible to reverse it. Even better, making healthy lifestyle choices now can mean you don’t have to deal with devastating diseases later in your life at all.

But sometimes, the unexpected does happen. You get that diagnosis for cancer or you find yourself in the emergency room with a heart attack. Under those circumstances, I still advocate natural care in addition to traditional care, but the advances of modern medicine can be literal lifesavers.

Clot-busting drugs have long been the standard of care for people who’ve had a heart attack. If you had a heart attack, your emergency room doctor would administer these drugs, and the drugs would help to break up the clot that is blocking the flow of blood to your heart.

But new research shows that taking a second step beyond clot-busting drugs can improve your overall outcome after a heart attack. Canadian researchers studied the affects of emergency angioplasty done within six hours of treatment with clot-busting drugs. In an angioplasty procedure, the doctor uses balloons and stents to open a blocked coronary artery. For a long time, doctors believed that doing angioplasty too soon after giving a patient clot-busting drugs could increase the risk of bleeding, but this study shows different.

The researchers found that angioplasty soon after drug treatment reduced second heart attacks by 40 percent and other major complications by 36 percent. Patients who received the angioplasty were also more comfortable during their recovery, experiencing less chest pain.

If you or a loved one has heart disease, it’s worth calling around to the hospitals in your area to find which of them have angioplasty facilities on site. If the unthinkable should happen and you suffer a heart attack, that’s the hospital you want to go to if at all possible. It’s also a good idea to discuss treatment plans with your doctor and your spouse before something like a heart attack happens. The old adage says hope for the best and plan for the worst. If you have heart disease, that adage is definitely worth following.

Stay well,
Meghan Krohn