Coronary heart disease remains the leading cause of death for men and women in the United States and other industrialized nations. Acute myocardial infarction accounts for a majority of these deaths, approaching 750,000 yearly. Thrombolytic therapy has revolutionized the treatment of myocardial infarction, saving lives to a greater extent than any treatment developed to date. The identification of patients best suited for thrombolytic therapy has been a challenging task, as has the ideal adjuvant strategy. Further, the noninvasic diagnosis of treatment successes and failures, as well as the expeditious triaging of patients requiring mechanical/surgical revascularization have been difficult to define, but progress has been made recently. The emergence of information vital for patient care has appeared at an extraordinary pace, with hundreds of articles being published yearly. Unfortunately, a resource devoted to the area of thrombolysis does not exist, making the dissemination of information to physicians, scientists and health care providers problematic. The Modern Era of Coronary Thrombolysis is designed to bring the medical and scientific communities up to date. It will serve as a foundation for future investigation, as well as a resource which can be referred to for many years to come
CONTENT
1. Mechanisms of Acute Myocardial Infarction -- 2. New Generation Thrombolytic Agents -- 3. Antiplatelet Agents -- 4. Thrombin Inhibitors -- 5. The Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction (TIMI) Trials -- 6. The Clinical Trials of the European Cooperative Study for Recombinant Tissue-Type Plasminogen Activator (rt-PA) -- 7. The International Studies of Infarct Survival (ISIS) -- 8. The Thrombolysis and Angioplasty in Myocardial Infarction (TAMI) Trials -- 9. Trial of Prehospital Thrombolysis for Acute Myocardial Infarction: Is Sooner Necessarily Better? -- 10. The Late Assessment of Thrombolytic Efficacy (LATE) Trial: Impact and Implications -- 11. The Global Utilization of t-PA and Streptokinase for Occluded Coronary Arteries (GUSTO-I) Trial -- 12. The Management of Heart Failure in the Age of Reperfusion -- 13. Thrombolytic Therapy in Elderly Patients -- 14. Thrombolytic Retreatment for Coronary Arterial Reocclusion -- 15. Radionuclide Imaging Techniques in the Thrombolytic Era -- 16. Biochemical Markers of Coronary Recanalization after Fibrinolytic Therapy -- 17. Monitoring Anticoagulant Therapy in the Setting of Thrombolytic Therapy -- 18. Acute Coronary Syndromes: Focus on Unstable Angina -- 19. Future of Coronary Thrombolysis
