Drug therapy doesn't buy time in heart attack

BOSTON (Reuters) - Drugs given to buy time for heart attack patients who do not have quick access to angioplasty do not help them live any longer or prevent further heart problems, researchers reported on Wednesday.

The international study of thousands of patients is bad news for people who do not live near a hospital equipped to reopen blocked arteries or who come to a hospital where there is no staff available to do the procedure, the researchers report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In those cases, doctors try to chemically clear the blockage by giving blood thinning and clot-busting drugs so patients can be delivered to an operating room, where surgeons can thread a balloon into the narrowed artery and force it open. Doctors try to have the artery open 90 minutes after a patient comes through an emergency room door.

The drugs used in this study, Lilly's ReoPro, or abciximab, and PDL BioPharma's Retavase, or reteplase, seemed to help clear things out, based on improvements in the electrocardiograms.

Reuters