Cardiac 'bruising' may predict worse heart attack

[nitpicker]

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-36467445

Cardiac 'bruising' may predict worse heart attack

8 June 2016

UK researchers say they have found a new way to tell if a heart attack is more severe and might cause lasting harm - by looking for bruising or bleeding in the heart muscle. Patients with this sign on scans more often develop serious problems like heart failure, says the Glasgow team. It's hoped the discovery could help with preventing such complications.
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The British Heart Foundation-funded work followed just over 200 patients to see how well they fared in the hours, weeks and months after being admitted to hospital with a heart attack. The researchers, who are presenting their work at a heart conference in Manchester, ran extra tests on the patients while they were in hospital.

Prof Colin Berry and his team found that patients who had signs of bleeding in their heart muscle were more likely to develop later complications than patients who didn't have this damage. This type of knowledge could ultimately help when doctors are deciding what treatment they should give and how long the patient should be closely monitored, says Prof Berry.

He suspects the bleeds may partly be caused by the blood-thinning drugs that doctors need to give to patients to treat a heart attack. Heart attacks occur when the main blood vessels supplying the heart get blocked by a clot. (snip) "We now know heart muscle bleeding is an adverse complication that we want to avoid," he said.

His team is now investigating whether there might be a better way to treat patients who have had a more severe heart attack - by injecting blood-thinning or clot-busting drugs directly into the heart's blood vessels rather than intravenously, for example.
(snip)