Rome, 25 September 2020 - Breathing difficulty, rapid heartbeat or chest pain, prolonged soreness in the left arm are among the possible signs of an acute cardiovascular disease such as myocardial infarction. Pathologies that still today represent the first cause of death in Italy and in the world. In view of World Heart Day, September 29th, the Campus Bio-Medico Polyclinic wants to shine a light on time-dependent pathologies by launching the hashtag #tempoèsalute.
Especially in this period characterized by the Covid-19 pandemic, many people, out of an often unjustified fear of contracting the virus, postpone access to the emergency room and urgent care. In the case of suspected cardiac ischemia, for example “Time is health. Those who experience chest pain for more than 20 minutes, especially if associated with difficulty breathing and possibly rapid heartbeats, should go to the emergency room to be examined and prevent potential complications - explains the prof. Francesco Grigioni, coordinator of the Cardio Center of the Campus Bio-Medico University Hospital. “Acute cardiac ischemia, for example, benefits from urgent treatments - keep it going Grisons - Breathing difficulty is not always a symptom of cardiac ischemia but can also be caused by thrombi that occlude the pulmonary arteries. Promptly dissolving these thrombi can make the difference, even in this case: this is why we say that time is health".
Timely access to treatment - in the emergency-urgency context - has significantly worsened since the beginning of the Covid-19 emergency: in myocardial infarction, the time between the onset of symptoms and the coronaries increased by 39%. According to the latest data (source: Italian Society of Cardiology) during the pandemic mortality from heart attack has tripled compared to the same period of 2019, reaching 13,7% compared to 4,1%. For fear of contracting the new coronavirus, many heart patients have not gone to the emergency room: i heart attack hospitalizations decreased by 60%.
"The delay in accessing treatment meant that patients presented to the emergency room in more serious conditions on average. In the context of myocardial infarction, this delay is particularly penalizing for the patient, where therapies such as primary angioplasty can be decisive, restoring normal circulation and thus saving the heart" - underlines the professor again Francesco Grisons. "Whoever is in these pathological conditions must go as soon as possible to an emergency room such as the one that has just been activated at the Campus Bio-Medico University Hospital, spontaneously or directed by a general practitioner", says Professor Grisons.
If it is true that people with cardiovascular diseases are more vulnerable in case of contagion from Coronavirus, failure to seek timely treatment in the emergency room or hospital implies risks for patients and important social implications. A research published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology on the occasion of World Heart Day 2019 showed that medical costs for acute coronary syndrome vary from 1.547 to 18.642 euros per person and that the overall cost of a heart attack is double the cost of care, if we consider the hours of work lost by patients and their family members or caregivers and if we add to these that those who return to work after a heart attack are 25% less productive in the first year. In fact, European data indicate that in the year following their heart attack, heart patients had lost 59 days of work and family members or caregivers 11 days, for an average cost, in Europe, of 13.953 euros. The high socio-economic impact of these pathologies has prompted the World Health Organization to set a goal: reduce cardiovascular risk by 25% by 2025.
To contribute to this goal everyone can do their part: health facilities by making the Emergency and Urgency Departments completely safe, as done by the Campus Bio-Medico University Hospital with the new Emergency Room, the first opened in the last fifteen years in Rome, designed to treat patients in the best possible way even at era of the Covid-19.
