Emergency patients delay elective surgeries before a major coronary event, a large study showed Wednesday.
A survey of 1,000 emergency room docs showed that 30 percent delay elective surgery after a major coronary event before their 50th birthday — up from 25 percent in 2003, according to a study of medical records that also reviewed health plans. The rate of delayed surgery doubled after the 2003 study — to 40 percent — in patients who experienced a heart attack or a stroke in 2005, according to the research, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The study included 1,002 general internists, general surgeons and anesthesiologists — one of the largest specialties to conduct the survey in the United States. Most doctors who reported delaying elective surgery saw less than two patients per year in the study period.
It is the latest in a string of studies showing that nearly half of do바카라ctors delay medical treatment until after they see an acute condition like a heart attack. They also can affect the quality of care, the research showed.
«You can ask a patient about their history, their family history. A bad history of cancer. We don’t want our patients being treated just because of a bad blood test because they had a heart attack,» said Dr. Mark Sussman, an emergency medicine physician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. «That’s not the way it’s supposed to happen.»
Sussman and his colleagues found a similar associatio우리카지노n after their 2011 study in the Journal of Internal Medicine. That study found that 44 percent of emergency room docs delay elective surgeries, compared with 12 percent of general internists and 15 percent of doctors in primary care who never had to see patients, the study reported.
Other studies have found similar effects, but were less comprehensive.
«The medical community is really well aware of these issues, bjarvees.comut we haven’t looked at it that closely yet,» said Dr. Thomas B. Friedman, an emergency physician at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn.
Friedman said that even though the rate of delayed elective surgery in medical schools is comparable to those in general medicine, some courses require students to learn about these health problems. «It’s hard,» he said.
He said the study didn’t say how many emergency room doctors actually delayed elective surgery. Bacteria can colonize arteries, and some of the drugs used in patients with coronary heart disease — drugs called fibrates — can make patients’ arteries thicker and slow bloo
