In a heart attack, seconds count, making the difference between life and death. New research shows which treatment may be best.
Doctors treating heart attack patients have to make a lot of decisions very quickly.
One decision is how to treat the patient. And there's surgery to open those arteries. Researchers looked at treatments for more than 60,000 heart attack patients nationwide and found that those who received the angiography treatments were less likely to die while still in the hospital than those who just received the clot-busting drugs. But there's a catch. This improved survival rate for patients who had the surgery only showed up at hospitals where a lot of these surgeries were done.