Heart Attack Patients Less Likely To Die When Cardiologists Are Away, Study Finds

March 11th, 2018

Awake Goy

Less heart attack patients die when cardiologists are away, study finds

Heart attack patients are less likely to die when top cardiologists are not in hospital, a disturbing new study has found.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School have warned that when so-called heart “specialists” are away on leave, the survival rate at their hospitals soars.

Telegraph.co.uk reports: They believe that specialists who attend the meetings are more prone to using intensive interventions for their patients which may do more harm than good, rather than taking a more holistic approach.

“Many medical interventions deliver no mortality benefit, and the fact that mortality actually falls for heart attack patients during these conference dates raises important questions about how care might differ during these periods,” said lead author Dr Anupam Jena, who described the findings as ‘an unfortunate paradox.’

Dr Jena and his team looked at 3,153 heart attack patients who were admitted to hospitals in the US during the world’s largest interventional cardiology meeting Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics. They then compared them to 31,156 heart attack patients who hospitalized when top cardiologists were present.

They found that 19.5 per cent of patients who did not need stents to widen blood vessels died within 30 days of admission when cardiologists were in the hospital, but only 16.9 when they were away.

For patients who do not undergo stenting, doctors must choose the right cardiac medicines and also accurately identifying and treating concurrent illnesses that may affect the risk of dying, such as certain types of infectious diseases.

Even when stents were used, overall, 15.3 percent of patients who went to the hospital with a heart attack on the dates of the meeting died within 30 days of admission, compared with 16.7 percent of patients admitted on nonmeeting dates.

The findings suggest that while the doctors who stayed were equally skilled at stenting as doctors who attended the meetings, those who stayed may have been better at overall care.

They found that doctors who attended conferences usually performed more stents, were much more focused on publishing research and more likely to run clinical trials than their peers who stayed behind.

“This is an unfortunate paradox given that professional conferences are designed to actually makes us better physicians and improve the care we deliver,” added added Dr Jena.

“If doctors focus their attention on a particular kind of procedure, they might not develop other clinical skills that are as important to influencing outcomes as is knowledge of a specific procedure.

“Treating a cardiac patient isn’t just about cardiac issues – it’s about other factors that the patient brings to the hospital.

The research was published in the Journal of the American Heart Association