Adding Plavix to other anti-clotting drugs typically given to heart attack patients saves lives and prevents second heart attacks, two huge international studies found. The strategy is the first big advance in heart attack care in more than a decade, since modern clot-busters were shown to work, specialists said. This cheap and simple treatment will have a big impact in the nation's community hospitals, where most Americans get care, they said. It could also help in developing countries where heart surgery and procedures to open blocked arteries are uncommon. «It really is a great day for heart attack patients,» said one of the researchers, Dr. Christopher Canon of Harvard Medical School. The results of the two studies were presented Wednesday at an American College of Cardiology conference in Orlando. One of the studies also was published online by the New England Journal of Medicine and will be in its March 24 print edition. The studies looked at heart attacks caused by a large clot that fully or almost completely blocks a major artery _ the type that accounts for about a third of the 865,000 heart attacks each year in the United States and the 10 million worldwide. These patients can be treated with emergency procedures to open the artery or with medications to dissolve the clot until they can be given an angiogram to see whether they need surgery or angioplasty. But arteries reclose about one-fourth of the time in people given medications, doubling their risk of dying before a procedure can be done. -More 2313 Local Time 2013 GMT
