Science For Health Care

If the EKG (Electrocardiography) shows that there is an acute heart attack (myocardial infarction), then the goal is to open the blocked artery as soon as possible and restore blood supply to the heart muscle.

When a heart attack strikes, the key thing to remember is that time equals muscle. The longer the delay in seeking medical care, the more heart muscle will be damaged. There is a window of opportunity to restore blood supply to the heart muscle by unblocking the affected heart artery. Treatments must be done in a hospital and include administration of clot-busting drugs to dissolve the clot at the site of the ruptured plaque and heart catheterization and angioplasty (in which the blood vessel is opened by balloon, often with adjunctive placement of a stent), or both.
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The heart is a muscle like any other in the body. It needs blood flow to supply oxygen to allow it to do work. When there isn’t enough oxygen, the muscle starts to suffer, and when there is no oxygen, the muscle starts to die.

Heart muscle gets its blood supply from arteries that start in the aorta and run on the surface of the heart, known as the coronary arteries. The right coronary artery supplies the right ventricle of the heart and the inferior (lower) portion of the left ventricle. The left anterior descending coronary artery supplies the majority of the left ventricle, while the circumflex artery supplies the back of the left ventricle.
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