Treatment for Myocardial Infarction

The most important risk factors for MI are known; however, more extensive work is required to investigate the risk factors underlying an individual's risk of developing MI.

The patient presenting with either chest pain or shortness of breath without cardiac symptoms on examination is unlikely to have STEMI. However, this may be true for a patient presenting with chest pain and cardiac symptoms, who is not on ST-elevation protocol. A routine electrocardiogram in such patients is likely to reveal a heart attack.\n

Myocardial infarction cannot be cured, but with standard medical treatment mortality should be reduced to less than 12.5%. This is a dramatic improvement from the 19.1% mortality in 1936.

STEMI, which is one of the three categories of AMI, is an acute attack of the heart that can cause a heart attack, causing low blood pressure, chest pain, nausea, sweating, breathlessness, and the feeling of fear. This can occur without pain in many cases and most cases are admitted to hospital sooner than the other AMI scenarios and treatment times are often longer as well.

The American Heart Association, National Heart Foundation and Cardiovascular Health Association reports that 11 million Americans have a heart attack each year. Around three million more are diagnosed with coronary heart disease (CHD), the leading cause of death in the United States each year.

The majority of patients presenting with acute myocardial infarction receive urgent thrombolytic therapy; however, a minority of those undergoing reperfusion therapies do not receive angiography. It is important to recognize the presence and treat patients undergoing catheter procedures as having AMI rather than being excluded from therapy.

Myocardial infarction runs in families. We found no evidence that the common risk locus SNPs are associated with increased risk of first ischemic event. Additional studies to elucidate the aetiology of this disease in families are needed.

The signs and symptoms of chest pain vary and may include a heart attack but the underlying cause is the same. In most of the cases chest pain leads to other diagnoses. Treatment may differ depending on the source of the chest pain and a coronary bypass surgery may be done and other treatment options are also options.

The SF-6D and SF-12D do not appear to provide meaningful information beyond that available from patient interviews and patient-prosthesis mismatch. These instruments should not be employed as substitutes for direct patient-reported tools. Further investigation of QoL instruments is required and research should be undertaken on the use of patient-reported QoL instruments in rehabilitation.

Since the age profile of MI in the United States is mostly made of healthy individuals aged <65 years, the average age of victims of MI in the United States is about 69 years. This means that the age of an average person who suffers from a myocardial infarction is about 10 years younger than what we think and what doctors think.

Recent findings demonstrates that primary PCI reduces death or MI in individuals with ST elevation MI, as well as MI with no ST elevation and STEMI complicated by either diabetes or renal failure. In contrast to other studies that have found similar improvements in survival with PCI for patients with more severe disease, the absolute survival benefit seen with PCI in patients with the less severe form of STEMI justifies treating all patients aggressively with PCI.