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Article: Chest pain units improve the treatment of heart attacks.
- Article from:
- Biotech Week
- Article date:
- October 8, 2003
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2003 OCT 8 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Chest pain accounts for a considerable number of consultations in emergency departments. Among several other causes of chest pain, heart attacks need to be ruled out promptly since a fast diagnosis shortens the time to treatment and this allows improved prognosis.
Pertinent to this, the current guidelines of the European Society of Cardiology recommend thrombolytics to be started within 60 minutes of hospital admission; similarly, the time window for percutaneus coronary intervention (PCI) is 90 minutes.
Recently, chest pain units (CPU) have been created in the emergency departments of many hospitals with the aim ...