Pune: When a 42-year-old patient complained of chest pain, his family rushed him to city-based Ruby Hall Clinic, where Dr Shirish Hiremath and his expert team immediately wheeled him into the cath lab and performed an emergency angioplasty.
A thin tube was threaded into the blood vessels of his heart to remove the blockages. A few months down the line, he is fit as a fiddle performing all his daily activities. He is one of the many young Indians to have been affected by a heart attack and one of the lucky few to have received the correct treatment and that too in time.
Dr Santanu Guha, former president of Cardiological Society of India (CSI), said that in India, around 3 million heart attacks occur every year.
“Of these, around 1.8 million patients do not receive any important therapy like urgent angioplasty or thrombolytic therapy. Thrombolysis, also known as thrombolytic therapy, is a treatment to dissolve dangerous clots in blood vessels, improve blood flow, and prevent damage to tissues and organs. If these untreated patients can be offered this therapy by improving the setup in the non urban hospitals, that will immensely improve the care of heart attack patients in our country,” said Dr Guha.
However, strides have been made in the field of prompt treatment, so much so that mortality, which was as high as 14 per cent just a couple of decades ago, has been brought down to under 5 per cent.
Dr Shirish Hiremath, Director, Cath Lab, Ruby Hall Clinic, highlights the evolution of such life-saving procedures, and also makes a comparison with treatments offered in the West.
“In mid 80s, the clot dissolving medicines made a huge impact. These were effective if given in the first 2 to 3 hours of the attack and even paramedics were encouraged to administer these in the ambulance, at home or in the helicopter used to transport patients from remote sites. Then came an era of clot dissolving medicines called thrombolytics, which were given in one shot, as a bolus, making them more effective and easier to administer. This era gave way to Primary Angioplasty (PAMI). In PAMI, the patient is taken directly to the cath lab and the blood flow is established with a balloon, thrombus aspiration and stent, explained Dr Hiremath, who is also former President of CSI.
When compared to thrombolysis, the re-establishment of blood flow from the blocked artery is guaranteed with PAMI. This is a major reason why the entire western world has moved away from thrombolysis to PAMI and cath labs are kept open and busy 24x7.
Bomi Bhote, CEO, Ruby Hall Clinic, said, “At Ruby Hall Clinic, we have performed over 1,00,000 procedures in one of India’s most technologically advanced cath-labs. In fact, people from rural pockets of Maharashtra also come to us for this life saving treatment.”
