Stockholm, Sweden – Giving heart attack patients a dose of “superaspirin” before rather than during a procedure to restore blood flow to the heart could save tens of thousands of lives a year, new research suggests.
In a major international study presented Sunday at a meeting of the European Society of Cardiology, scientists found that giving heart attack victims the drug Plavix when they arrive at the emergency room almost halved the risk of a stroke, a repeated heart attack or death within the first month after angioplasty.
Angioplasty, a procedure where doctors thread a wire through the blood vessels and use an inflatable mesh tube to open narrowed or clogged arteries, is performed on about 2 million people worldwide every year.
Patients during this procedure are routinely given Plavix, often called superaspirin because it prevents blood clots in a similar way to aspirin but has a higher potency, because inflating the mesh tube inside the blood vessels disturbs the lining of the artery and attracts clots.
However, in the study of 1,863 heart attack patients, led by Dr. Marc Sabatine from the Harvard University-affiliated Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, 6.3 percent of the people who got 300 milligrams of Plavix at the time of their angioplasty had a heart attack or stroke or died from heart complications during the subsequent month.
However, only 3.6 percent of those who got the drug several hours beforehand went on to suffer those problems.
The findings indicate that the strategy would save one in every 23 patients from a heart attack, stroke or heart-related death, said Sabatine, who presented the findings at the conference.
