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Thursday, October 2, 2003
SCI-TECH
THE BATTALION
October 2,
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Heart attack treatments
becoming more effective
By Daniel Q. Haney
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WESTON, Fla. — Almost
anywhere else, the ambulance
crew would have gathered up
Buddy LaRosa in mid-heart
attack and roared off to the closest
emergency room.
They arrived that hot summer
afternoon to find a classic cardiac
emergency, the kind suffered by
more than 1 million Americans a
year. LaRosa had just climbed out
of his pool from swimming laps,
and he had an awful pain in his
chest. His left ami was numb.
Soon the paramedics had a
dozen electrocardiograph leads
hooked to his chest. The spiky
waves showed an ominous pat
tern. ST-segment elevation,
they call it, the worst kind of
heart attack.
Somewhere ,,
inside his heart, a
blood clot had
blocked one of
the major arteries.
Muscle down
stream from it
would starve and
die unless some
thing was done,
and fast.
So the usual practice of head
ing for the nearest medical facili
ty — in this case, a perfectly
competent community hospital
just five minutes from LaRosa’s
house — would seem to make
perfect sense.
There, he would probably get
a shot of a clot-dissolving drug,
standard treatment since the
mid-’80s.
But heart attack treatment has
undergone a quiet revolution.
Many heart specialists now agree
that the clot-dissolving drugs are
passe, or should be, and large hos
pitals have generally stopped
using them. Instead, the best treat-
ment is an emergency procedure
called a primary angioplasty.
Even more reliably than clot
drags, it can stop a heart attack
cold if done within the first two or
three hours. But it is available
only at major hospitals with top-
tier cardiac centers.
So the little community hospi
tal is no longer the ideal place to
treat a heart attack.
Nevertheless, specialists esti
mate that only about a third of
heart attacks in the United States
are treated with primary angio
plasty. Most end up at hospitals
that can’t do them, and they aren’t
transferred to places that can.
So the most remarkable thing
about LaRosa’s otherwise run-of-
the-mill heart attack last July was
what happened after the medics
loaded him into their big red
ambulance. They raced right by
that community hospital, then
past another one, eating up 20
precious minutes to deliver
LaRosa to Cleveland Clinic
Florida, a new
hospital in Fort
Lauderdale’s
lush western
suburbs. The
medics transmit
ted LaRosa’s
EKG ahead, giv
ing the four-
member angio
plasty team time
to get ready.
Twenty minutes after they
wheeled him through the ER
doors, LaRosa was stretched out
in the second-floor catheterization
lab beneath a big overhead X-ray
camera. The pictures showed his
right coronary artery blocked.
Quickly, Dr. Howard Bush
pushed a wire through the clot,
then briefly inflated a balloon.
The obstruction disappeared.
The heart attack was over.
LaRosa’s experience was
unusual because the Broward
County ambulance service is one
of the nation’s few with a policy
of driving heart attack patients to
medical centers that can do pri
mary angioplasty.
“In our community, this sys
tem has worked,” says Bush. “I
know we are saving lives.”
This system has
worked. I know we
are saving lives.
99
Dr. Howard Bush
cardiologist
rkshop
IDay
.1 Advising
Why bother with parking
when you can walk
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The Peace Corps is search of graduates
with Agriculture, Environment and Health
backgrounds for 2-year projects in one of
our 70 host nations. Talk to Peace Corps
Recruiter James Barta at the following
times:
• Wednesday, Oct. 8, 5:30 to 6:45 p.m.
Info Meeting, MSC Room 230 ^
• Thursday. Oct. 9, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. f|
Career Fair, MSC Flagroom
• Thursday, Oct. 9. 7 to 8:15 p.m.
MSC. Room 229
Visit the TAMU Career Center
209 Koldus Building to pick up a
Peace Corps Catalog.
www.peacecorps.gov • 800.424.8580
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Undergraduate
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All undergrads doing research are eligible to
submit their work for possible publication.
LATE DEADLINE: Oct. 3, 2003
Rm. 230 Reed-McDonald or email to
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