Faster Care After Heart Attack Fails to Reduce Deaths
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One of the most successful efforts in modern medicine, cutting the time it takes to treat heart-attack patients after they arrive at a hospital, has failed to deliver on its most highly anticipated benefit: saving lives.
A study of 96,738 patients experiencing a massive heart attack showed time to treatment was reduced 20 percent to 67 minutes from 2005 to 2009 because of improved coordination among hospital units and emergency workers. Still, about 5 percent of patients died in the hospital in 2009, almost the same as four years earlier when care was slower, according to research in the New England Journal of Medicine.