Heart attacks are typically treated by placing stents at the sites of narrowing coronary arteries. This has become a standard of care and advances in cath lab technologies allows interventional cardiologists to accurately place stents in a matter of minutes.
Now another option, called SuperSaturated Oxygen (SSO2), is being made available thanks to a brand new approval from the FDA. SSO2 is the first treatment approved by the FDA since percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI, aka stenting) to help reduce the damage that heart attacks cause.
The therapy, developed by TherOx, a company based in Irvine, California, involves pumping hyperbaric levels of oxygen directly to oxygen-deprived myocardium just after PCI is complete and blood flow is restored. Specifically, it is indicated for patients suffering from left anterior descending ST-elevation myocardial infarction (LAD STEMI) and within six hours of symptoms onset.
“Even after angioplasty with stenting, many heart attack patients suffer from irreversible damage to the heart muscle, which carries a poor prognosis in terms of mortality and the potential for future heart failure,” said Gregg W. Stone, M.D., professor of medicine, Columbia University Medical Center, in a TherOx announcement. “SuperSaturated Oxygen is the only therapy shown in a pivotal randomized trial to reduce infarct size in patients with large anterior myocardial infarction, offering the potential to further improve outcomes in these high-risk patients despite successful primary angioplasty.”
Product page: TherOx DownStream System…
Via: TherOx…
