[Acute myocardial infarction mortality in a hospital department during the last decades]

Authors surveyed the data of 2677 patients with acute myocardial infarction treated in cardiological department between 1970 and 1993. Activity of Coronary Care Unit (has been working from 1974) reduced the earlier hospital mortality in general internal medicine possibilities with 50%. Main cause of this reduction was the temporal electrotherapy of cardiac arrhythmias. Since the middle of last decade the goal of has been generally introduced combined therapy (beta-blockers, intravenous nitrates, acetyl-salicic acid, thrombolytics) is to reduce the mass of damaged myocardium and hereby increasing the ratio of survival. They reduced the hospital mortality around 10% with consistent application of this therapy. According to the authors application of thrombolytic therapy has basic importance in management of myocardial infarction, but they could not treat a lot of patients with streptokinase in consequence of too long prehospital time period and not properly controlled hypertension. The proportion of systemic thrombolytic therapy on their patients is almost a quarter of them. It would be very important to increase this beneficial ratio with reducing the time of patients decision to turn to health care and applying systemic thrombolytic therapy more than six hours after the onset of symptoms of myocardial infarction.