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Team approach to cardiac care increases chance of surviving heart attack complications

Press releases may be edited for formatting or style | July 11, 2019 Cardiology

The approach improved survival rate at 30 days for both patients that were discharged and those that remained in the hospital regardless of whether they were originally admitted to University hospital or transferred from referring hospitals. Team decision-making did not appreciably impact the speed of care, as measured by the amount of time between presentation of refractory cardiogenic shock and placement on mechanical support.

Antigone Koliopoulou, M.D., co-author and U of U Health cardiothoracic surgeon, reasons that their success emanates from the collective wisdom of the team. "We think that having a consensus medical decision while carefully discerning positives and negatives of each patient case from the point of view of all involved medical specialties is more likely to be appropriate compared to an individual physician's decision," she says.

At University Hospital, where the study was carried out, the Shock Team remains standard of care practice, demonstrating that the approach is sustainable. Larger clinical trials will need to be carried out to gauge effectiveness in different populations and hospitals.

"This work demonstrates that outcomes can improve when research and academic aspects of such clinical programs are developed in close connection," Drakos says. "Parallel development is mutually beneficial and comes full circle, increasing both the potential of the research and of clinical and patient care."


The research published as "Shock Team Approach in Refractory Cardiogenic Shock Requiring Short-Term Mechanical Support" was carried out by Iosif Taleb, Antigone Koliopoulou, Anwar Tandar, Stephen H. McKellar, Joseph E. Tonna, Jose Nativi-Nicolau, Miguel Alvarez Villela, Frederick Welt, Josef Stehlik, Edward M. Gilbert, Omar Wever-Pinzon, Jack H. Morshedzadeh, Elizabeth Dranow, Craig H. Selzman, James Fang and Stavros Drakos.

Researchers received support from the American Heart Association, the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute and the Nora Eccles Treadwell Foundation.

Drakos is a consultant for Abbott.

Find out about the latest advances in cardiogenic shock research and care at the annual Utah Cardiac Recovery Symposium.


About University of Utah Health
University of Utah Health provides leading-edge and compassionate medicine for a referral area that encompasses 10% of the U.S., including Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and much of Nevada. A hub for health sciences research and education in the region, U of U Health has a $356 million research enterprise and trains the majority of Utah's physicians and more than 1,250 health care providers each year at its Schools of Medicine and Dentistry and Colleges of Nursing, Pharmacy and Health. With more than 20,000 employees, the system includes 12 community clinics and four hospitals. For nine straight years, U of U Health has ranked among the top 10 U.S. academic medical centers in the Vizient Quality and Accountability Study, including reaching No. 1 in 2010 and 2016.

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