If you are suffering from heart-health difficulties or randomly experience chest pain, it turns out that having a specialist ready and willing to treat you isn’t as necessary as you might think.
All of this seems counter-intuitive, but a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine found frail patients admitted to teaching hospitals with two common types of heart problems were more likely to survive on days when national cardiology conferences were going on, according to NPR.
“There’s something very specific about cardiology meetings and cardiology outcomes,” said Dr. Anupam Jena, a professor at Harvard Medical School and the lead researcher of the study. “I can tell you with almost certainty that something different is happening in the hospital, but I can’t tell you why this is happening.”
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For the study, researchers looked at Medicare patients who were admitted to 263 major teaching hospitals between 2002 and 2011. The unique part: they looked at patients who were admitted during the times when doctors were busy attending meetings at the American Heart Association or the American College of Cardiology.
Dr. Patrick O’Gara, president of the American College of Cardiology, said he was reassured by the finding that patient mortality didn’t increase when those doctors were away. “People should take away from this particular paper that they should be confident of going to a teaching hospital at any time of the year,” he said. He cautioned against drawing any conclusions from the paper’s finding that mortality rates dropped for some people, noting that the data are “not granular enough to provide information about what types of patient therapies the patients received.”
Researchers seem to think that cardiologists might be more apt to give the go-ahead with aggressive treatments, and that could be detrimental.
The researchers found that 18 percent of high-risk patients with heart failure —where the heart muscle doesn’t pump blood as well as it should — died on conference days, while 25 percent died on the non-meeting days. The difference was even greater for patients with cardiac arrest, when the heart isn’t pumping blood. The study found 59 percent of cardiac arrest patients died when conferences were underway, while 69 percent died on other days.
The researchers suggested several possibilities, but also found reasons to doubt those explanations. It could be that cardiologists who attend conferences are more likely to do aggressive medical treatments such as complex angioplasties than are those doctors who skip conferences. While invasive treatments often save lives, they can also result in infections and other complications, some of which can be deadly.
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The study does mention that during conference days, less people are likely to do elective procedures, so that could affect the numbers. And heart attack patients had just as high a chance of dying whether their specialist was there or not.
It’s not clear whether or not all of this is good news or bad news, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
