New ACC poster: many STEMI patients present with subtle ST elevation. Their prognosis is similar to those who meet STEMI “criteria”. They need early reperfusion.
However, this study could have missed many occlusions because they only studied patients who did get immediate primary PCI. They did not study the NonSTEMI patients who were later found to have limited coronary flow and might have benefited from immediate reperfusion.
Was just hammering this point home this AM to some paramedic students, great to see it out there! The heart has no idea what a millimeter means; for all we know it's still on the Imperial system (bad ECG humor).
So glad to see this work being done! I've often considered just how difficult it would be to provide some hard numbers for the kinds of subtle cases we discuss so often. Congrats to the investigators!
However, these are just the ones that got activated! How many NonSTEMIs had an occluded artery and sublte STE???