Improved diagnostic accuracy for acute myocardial infarction
The role of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to assess the effect of therapy in patients with acute myocardial infarction was demonstrated in a series of papers presented at the 12th Annual Scientific Sessions of the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (SCMR).
Cardiovascular MRI offers the ability to measure after therapy the size a myocardial infarction would have had if no therapy had been performed (Salvage-imaging). This allows physicians to assess the effect of their intervention and thus to perform studies to optimise the benefit to their patients.
Before this new technique became available, this knowledge could only be generated to compare large groups of patients who underwent different treatment regimes to average the differences between the groups. With the new technique, these differences can now be corrected for and thus much faster progress towards individually optimised therapy can be generated.
‘Using the new MR technique we have been able to show, in a relatively small trial of 220 patients, that therapy in patients after myocardial infarction can be optimised adding anti-oxidative agents to standard therapy,’ said Holger Thiele MD (Leipzig University). ‘We had known this from animal data before and could now demonstrate this effect in patients using MRI as an endpoint.’
Magnetic resonance imaging has already been established as an endpoint for cardiac function, size and measuring the size of irreversible myocardial damage after myocardial infarction. It is now expanding to a further endpoint for myocardial salvage in patients with acute myocardial infarction.
01.05.2009
