Heart Attack Treatments

Saving Lives

A doctor's choice of heart attack treatments will depend on when he first sees the patient, and whether he is in a hospital or not. We now have some fairly science fiction treatments for a fresh heart attack victim, which are designed to halt damage to the body until the body's own systems can begin functioning again and pick up where they left off. This is important because up till now, most damage resulting from a heart attack is due to tissue die-off while the body isn't getting oxygen.

This particularly affects the heart itself, and the brain. So some recent pioneering heart attack treatments involve injecting a slurry of tiny particles of ice into the lungs. This effects a rapid cooling of the heart and surrounding tissues, slows respiration and greatly reduces tissue damage. Similar treatments have been tried with stroke victims to protect the brain.

Different Kinds of Heart Attack Treatments

When a heart attack patient is in recovery, one of the main concerns is to reduce triglycerides and LDL, which is the bad cholesterol. The reason why triglycerides are so bad is that they displace HDL, or the good cholesterol which we need to have as high as possible. So most heart attack treatments focus on this one area; balancing cholesterol levels so that LDL and triglycerides are low, and HDL is as high as possible.

Sometimes medication is given to ensure that this balance of cholesterol is achieved as quickly as possible. But the ideal is to achieve it with diet and exercise, and perhaps natural supplements that don't have the side effects found with cholesterol-reducing drugs. The most radical heart attack treatments for years have included surgery to bypass one or more heart valves if arteriosclerosis is so advanced that the heart cannot function. Nowadays, the new treatment is balloon angioplasty where tiny inflatable balloons are passed into the arteries and inflated to scrape out the plaque that is causing the blockage.