A new study is on the way which would try to find out whether the standard approach to send a patient for “Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) only after the failure of clog-busting drugs after an hour or so or it should be observed on the routine basis to send the patients treated with the clog-busting drugs to a cardiac catheterization laboratory for follow-up PCI.

Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is considered to be the best treatment for heart attack. It works on a combination of catheter-mounted balloons and stents to restore blood flow to the heart after unblocking the coronary artery. However the requisite is that PCI has to be performed rapidly which only few hospitals can achieve. Only the hospitals with a cardiac catheterization laboratory on site meet the 90-minute treatment goal.

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A new study shows that the smokers who develop symptoms pertaining to depression during hospitalization for a heart attack will have a harder time giving up smoking.Dr. Anne N. Thorndike of ‘Massachusetts General Hospital’ and ‘Harvard Medical School’ in Boston, the study’s lead author said that the depression is common among heart attack patients and these issues are more important to be taken into consideration before one can expect them to show improvement in quitting smoking in real terms. Thorndike further added that the depressed smokers tend to pick up the habit within four weeks thus making it more important to address these concerns at an early stage. The smokers also show a mental reluctance to show seriousness towards the efforts for reducing the risk of cardiac troubles further.

During the study, 245 smokers had been followed up who had been in the hospital due to heart attack or unstable angina. “Unstable angina” is a type of acute chest pain that occurs when your heart doesn’t get enough oxygen. It can be a warning sign of a heart attack. They were undergoing the dame treatment comprising of smoking cessation counseling and medication which included either bupropion hydrochloride, an anti-smoking medication sold as ‘Zyban’, or an inactive placebo.

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