Early treatment within five minutes of the first symptom is necessary to prevent or limit damage to the heart muscle. Medical personnel can begin diagnosis and treatment even before getting to the hospital.
Heart Attack Treatment
Certain medicinal heart attack treatments can start immediately if you suspect or confirm a heart attack. These include:
- Oxygen to balance the short supply
- Aspirin - prevents blood clot
- Nitrates are commonly used to treat during heart attach, they relax and widen blood vessels and allow more blood to flow to the heart thus reducing its workload.
- Treatment to relief chest pain
Once confirm or suspect heart, start treatment to restore blood flow at the earliest. Treatments are medicines and medical procedures.
Heart Attack medications
- Thrombolytic Medicines – is a clot buster, because they dissolve blood clots that are blocking the coronary arteries. For the best result, this medication must give within one hour of heart-attack symptoms.
- Beta-blockers - reduce heart rate and blood pressure by dilating blood vessels. Thus, decrease the workload on the heart and so relieve chest pain or discomfort and help prevent additional heart attacks. Beta-blockers also can be useful to correct irregular heartbeat or arrhythmias.
- Anticoagulants - blood-thinning medication prevents blood clot from forming in the arteries.
- Aspirin and Clopidogrel – is an Antiplatelet medication, stops platelets in blood cells to join and forming undesirable clots.
Medical Procedures for heart-attack
If medicines do not produce expected results by stopping a heart attack, medical procedures such as a surgical or non-surgical method may utilize.
Coronary Angioplasty - A non-surgical procedure used to open blocked coronary arteries. A thin flexible tube called a catheter with a balloon at the end is slowly threading via the blood vessel to the blocked coronary artery. Then, inflate the balloon to clear the plaque by pressing against the wall of the artery; it widens and restores blood flow. A small mesh tube called a stent may put in the artery to help keep it open forever. Sometime, the stents are coat with medications to help prevent the artery from blocked again.
Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting - Take an artery or vein from other parts of the body and place it around blocked coronary to bypass these coronary arteries in a surgical procedure. This makes a new route for proper blood flow to the heart muscle.
Treatment is necessary after an attack and discharged from Hospital. Ever after left the hospital, treatment should continue. The treatment may include daily medication and cardiac rehabilitation.
Therapeutic lifestyle changes are needed that may include; quit smoking, lose weight, diet modification, and increased physical activity, to prevent or reduce the chances of having another heart attack.
Cardiac Rehabilitation after a heart-attack
Cardiac rehabilitation team includes many specialists; include family doctor, cardiologist (doctor specialized in treating heart), nurses, exercise specialist, physical or occupational therapist, dietitian, and psychologist.
- Exercising – heart is a muscle and with a proper exercise, it can be nourished and strengthened to prevent another heart attack.
- Education – rehabilitation team provides tips and helps to learn the best practices to take care of the health, particularly heart’s health.
- Counseling – is to overcome the fear of future and about the next heart attack. The anxiety or stress itself can trigger another one.
- Learning – learn from heart-attack experience, which are the instances, which are unsuitable and need to reduce or avoid. In many cases of it is trigger by stress, so it is necessary to learn to overcome and prevent stress-full situations.
Cardiac rehabilitation will help to take care of the heart health to prevent having another heart attack.