The latest study of emergency angioplasty procedures confirms that Marin General Hospital is in the forefront of emergency cardiac care.

MGH Cardiologists Drs. Joel Sklar, David Sperling and Brian Strunk said, "We've have been using emergency angioplasty to treat heart attack patients since April 1999 and a new study confirms that the procedure is superior to clot dissolving drugs.

"The study, published April 17 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is similar to 20 earlier ones that have shown the superiority of opening clogged arteries with balloons and other devices as the initial therapy rather than clot-dissolving drugs like tissue plasminogen activator, or TPA.

"Heart attacks are the leading cause of death in the U.S. At Marin General, cardiologists are on-call 24 hours a day to treat heart attack patients in the hospital's modern, completely digitized Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory, the only one in the county.

"Over the past three years, we've treated 190 heart attack patients by emergency angioplasty with a mortality rate of 4.2 percent, a better mortality rate than reported in last month's Johns Hopkins Hospital study.

"MGH sees about 300 heart attack patients a year but not all of them can be treated by emergency angioplasty.

"As with any heart attack patient, time is critical to successful treatment. That's why, as we move forward, it's important that our paramedic teams have the capability to conduct field EKG tests so that the appropriate hospital staff are already preparing for the angioplasty while the patient is being transported to Marin General."