Treatment for Heart Attacks

Treatment for Heart Attacks

For patients who are displaying heart attack symptoms, early treatment is key to saving their lives and minimize damage to their heart muscle, making emergency room heart attack treatments a critical component of their survival and recovery.

What Does Emergency Room Heart Attack Treatment Involve?

When a patient arrives at PrestigeER they will undergo a thorough physical assessment to diagnose if in fact they are suffering or have recently had a heart attack.

The assessment will include a series of tests to help the emergency physicians determine what kind of heart attack the patient sustained. The tests include:

• Cardiac Enzyme Analysis, is a blood test to check for damage to the heart muscle.
• Electrocardiogram or EKG, will monitor the heart’s rhythm while at the same time check for abnormalities in the heart’s electrical system.
• During early treatment, heart attack victims are administered medications to protect the heart and ease the pain. These may include but are not limited to:
  • Aspirin to prevent further blood clotting,
  • Nitroglycerin to relax the coronary arteries increasing blood flow which allows more oxygen to reach the heart, nitrates can also reduce chest pain.
  • Oxygen therapy is normally administered through a tube in the nose.
• Patients who go into cardiac arrest may require therapeutic hypothermia which involves injecting a liquid into the bloodstream to cool down the body for up to 24 hours, this therapy helps protect against brain damage due to lack of oxygen.
• Cardiac catheterization, this procedure involves threading a thin flexible tube into the heart from a blood vessel in the wrist or groin to open a blocked artery and restore normal blood flow.

What to Expect from Emergency Room Heart Attack Treatment?

• Emergency physicians and nurses are trained to work quickly to diagnose and stabilize patients who are brought in with heart attack symptoms. Early treatment is administered until a diagnosis has been confirmed and the type of heart attack has been identified.There are two types of heart attacks:
  • STEMI or ST-elevation myocardial infarction: Cause by a blood clot that forms unexpectedly and completely blocks an artery in the heart. The damage caused by a STEMI heart attack covers a large area and extends deep into the heart muscle. The preferred treatment for this type of heart attack is cardiac catheterization also known as percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), this should be done within 90 minutes of the patient receiving early care.
  • NSTEMI or non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction: Diagnosis of this type of heart attack is complex since signs don’t always appear right away, patients may require observation and several cardiac enzyme analyses to determine patterns. Although NSTEMI heart attacks are also caused by blood clots, these have different amounts of clotting proteins and platelets, therefore clot-busting medications are not effective, cardiac catheterization is a treatment option, but it does not need to be performed so fast. The good news is that heart damage from NSTEMI heart attacks doesn’t usually extend through the full depth of the heart muscle.