More than one million Americans have a heart attack each year, and over 25% of those people die as a result. When the blood supply to your heart suddenly becomes blocked, a heart attack happens. If the blood supply isn’t restored quickly, part of the heart muscle will die due to lack of oxygen.
The symptoms of a heart attack can vary a great deal from person to person. Some of the most common symptoms include:
Recovery from a heart attack depends upon how fast it’s treated. One way to measure the speed of a facility is its "door-to-balloon time"—the time from when a patient with a heart attack arrives in the emergency department until that person's coronary artery is re-opened with a balloon catheter.
At UR Medicine Cardiac Care, we’ve optimized our process to cut door-to-balloon time to under 90 minutes, beating the national standard. In fact, our speed in treating heart attacks places us in the top 10% of all hospitals in the U.S.
Plus, our Heart Attack Team is on standby 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, and we are one of the few heart centers in the country that has the ability to use temporary heart pumps to help a patient's heart through the period of most intense shock.