Doctors Say Drug Combination Can Cut Heart Attack Deaths
An aspirin and a clot-dissolving drug given within 24 hours of the onset of a heart attack can dramatically reduce deaths and should now be considered standard treatment, doctors said Thursday.
“I’ve never seen a trial that produced results as striking as these,” said Richard Peto, a researcher in a new study showing that the drug combination can reduce the death rate after heart attacks from 13% to 8%.
The treatment could save the lives of 25,000 of the 500,000 Americans who have heart attacks each year if they all received it, Peto said. It costs about $150 and can be done at any community hospital or by a doctor outside a hospital, the researchers said.
But the word has not gotten out to doctors, Peto said.
“At the moment, most patients in the United States don’t have blood-clot dissolving treatment of any type,” he said.
Getting the Word Out
Dr. Peter Sleight, chairman of the study’s steering committee, said: “Our object is to get the results of this treatment widely known so people will get this treatment.”
Peto and other study participants spoke at a news conference in conjunction with publication of the latest findings in the forthcoming issue of the Lancet, a British medical journal. The results were publicized in March at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology in Atlanta.
The researchers studied 17,187 patients at 417 hospitals around the world. Some patients were given aspirin, and some the clot-dissolving drug streptokinase. Another group was given both, and a control group was given neither.
The death rate up to five weeks after a heart attack was 13% in the untreated control group. It dropped to about 10.5% in the patients given either aspirin or streptokinase, and dropped to 8% in patients given both drugs, Peto said.
Furthermore, the study showed that the drugs reduced deaths in elderly patients, who were previously not thought suitable for clot-dissolving treatment because doctors thought it might increase their risk of strokes, Peto said.
