Treatments Proven Effective in Studies, Work in Real Life Too

New study finds proven heart attack methods lower death rates

April 29, 2011

A recent study finds new treatment strategies have been proven to lower mortality in heart attack victims.

"Evidence-based medicine" means just what it says - treatments that have been shown in scientific studies to work. But studies are one thing - do these treatments work as well in real-world clinics and hospitals? A new study in Sweden found that they do.

Researchers at Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm analyzed a government registry of more than 60,000 patients with a particular type of very serious heart attack called ST-elevation myocardial infarction. These patients were treated between 1996 and 2007, a time of increasing sophistication in caring for heart attack victims.

Lead author Tomas Jernberg says studies began showing benefit from simple things like taking aspirin to advanced, high-tech therapies like bypass surgery.

"During the last two decades we have seen that several new treatment strategies have been proven to lower mortality and morbidity," he says. "And in this study, we wanted to examine the effects of these efforts on the given treatment and survival in the clinical reality."

So did all these new evidence-based strategies work?

Jernberg says the answer became clear as hospitals gradually adopted proven therapies.