Care Yourself from Heart Attack

Heart attack: should patients be kept in intensive care?

Even after infarction, the issue of maintaining casualties in intensive care is now emerging.  

Care Yourself from Heart Attack

Heart attack victims do not need to be kept in intensive care after surgery, according to a new study. This is a STEMI-type heart attack (myocardial infarction with ST-elevation), which occurs when the arterial obstruction is complete, that is, the blood circulation in a coronary artery carrying precious blood. Oxygen to the heart is completely interrupted.

These units do not only have advantages

Today, patients with STEMI-type heart attacks are almost always hospitalized in intensive care. However, these units do not only have benefits: they increase the probabilities of being reoperated, of infections and affect the quality of sleep of the patients. 

"Intensive care is like any treatment," says Thomas Valley, assistant professor of internal medicine and lead author of the study. "Caregivers need to know if it's good for a person or not, as we try to do with drugs," he adds.

His team analyzed the medical history of more than 100,000 hospitalized patients for a STEMI-type infarction. The victims were hospitalized in 1,727 US facilities from January 2014 to October 2015, and most were sent to intensive care after their operation. Assessment: an increase in the costs of care and survival chances similar to those of a conventional hospitalization.

Discussion among cardiologists

While European guidelines recommend intensive care for STEMI-type heart attack victims, the US has never addressed this issue. "At home, all STEMI patients are admitted to intensive care," says Michael Thomas, who heads Michigan Medicine's intensive care unit. "But knowing where to send these patients is a hot topic for cardiologists right now," he says. 

"Recent studies suggest that many patients do not need intensive care and that it is wasting resources, but before changing models, we need to make sure we understand the ins and outs," he continues. In France, 46,000 cardiac arrests take place every year. The survival rate after 30 days is 4.9%, increasing to 10.4% when a cardiac massage was performed immediately after the loss of consciousness.