Sept. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Patients rushed to the hospital for treatment of a suspected heart attack may fare just as well by waiting until the next day to have a procedure done, a French study has found.

Performing artery-clearing procedures such as angioplasty or inserting a stent in people when they come to the hospital emergency room had similar results as waiting a day, the study found. The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found little difference in heart muscle damage among patients whether they were given procedures 70 minutes or 21 hours after admission.

The findings go against a common view that delaying treatment for a suspected heart attack will lead to poor outcomes. The study shows that waiting until the next day when a patient’s own doctor can perform the procedure works just as well in many cases as performing the procedure immediately, which may involve calling in an emergency team, said Chet Rihal, who runs the catheterization lab at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and wasn’t an author of today’s paper.

“The lesson that people are going to take away from this is it’s safe to wait until the next working day with well-rested operators and well-rested teams rather than in an emergency situation in the middle of the night,” said Rihal, who is also a professor of medicine, in a telephone interview today. ”It doesn’t mean that doing it immediately is bad, it just means that you don’t have to do it immediately.”

Further Studies

Further studies are needed to determine which time period is most cost-effective, the researchers said.

Leading author Gilles Montalescot and researchers from the Institute of Cardiology at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Pitie-Salpetriere in Paris evaluated data from 352 patients with acute coronary syndrome who received either immediate or delayed interventions from August 2006 through September 2008.

They found that 24 people, or almost 14 percent, of those in the immediate group and 18 people, or 10 percent, of the delayed group died, had a heart attack or needed another procedure like angioplasty or heart bypass surgery after a month.

No difference was also seen in other complications, including major bleeding at one month, the researchers said.

“The strategy of immediate intervention does not appear to provide any benefit or harm in comparison with an intervention postponed to the next working day,” the authors wrote.

Hospital stays in the immediate group were “significantly reduced” to an average of 55 hours compared with 77 hours in the delayed group, they said.

‘Conservative Strategies’

“In general, conservative strategies consume considerable resources, drugs and physician and nursing time, and this shortening in hospital stays may appear to be a practical and economic advantage in high-volume centers with a rapid turnover, especially when the patients present during daytime and catheterization rooms are already activated,” the researchers said in the study.

Acute coronary syndrome is any condition brought on by “sudden, reduced blood flow to the heart,” according to the Mayo Clinic Web site. The condition may develop over time caused by the buildup of plaque in the arteries of the heart, making it more difficult for blood to flow through.

For Related News and Information:

To contact the reporter on this story: Nicole Ostrow in New York at nostrow1@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: September 1, 2009 16:00 EDT