Abstract
Although the incidence of in-hospital death from acute myocardial infarction (MI) is about 5%, about 40% of the patients who suffer acute MI die mainly before hospitalization. It takes days to weeks from the time of coronary plaque rupture to the onset of acute MI in half of acute MI patients, although it takes only a day for the rest half of the patients. It is also known that a half of acute MI patients have pre-infarction angina days to weeks before the onset of acute MI. This symptom of unstable angina is often disregarded by the patients because it is often a mild chest pain or heartburn of short duration.
However, if we can treat all of those pre-infarction angina patients properly, we can prevent them from suffering MI and reduce the number of MI patients into half. In order to make those patients with pre-infarction angina go to hospital, “STOP MI campaign” has been started by The Japanese Circulation Society.
