ORLANDO, Florida - A cocktail of an anti-blood-clot drug and aspirin can save victims of massive heart attacks by keeping their arteries unclogged, according to US and Chinese studies presented here Wednesday.
About 3,500 men and women were studied in the United States on the effects of the anti-blood clot medicine Plavix, while a second study was conducted in China on nearly 46,000 people who had suffered a big heart attack.
"The new trials were meant to show Plavix can also keep the artery open and cut risk of another heart attack in people with large heart attacks, and they did so convincingly," said Marc Sabatine, who supervised the US study.
The studies were presented at the American College of Cardiology's meeting in this central Florida city.
Plavix is sold by the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis and the US group Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., which financed a large part of the studies.
Half the people in the US study were treated with the Plavix-aspirin cocktail within 12 hours of massive heart attacks triggered by the total clogging of a coronary artery.
The other half were given other anti-blood clot medicines mixed with a placebo, said Sabatine, of the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.
After a one-week treatment, 22 percent of people who took the placebo still had clogged arteries, suffered a second heart attack or died, he said. In the Plavix group, 15 percent suffered the same fates.
The results show that the cocktail reduced the risk of death or new heart attack by 36 percent.
Oxford University's doctor Zhengming Chen discussed the Chinese study, conducted over five years on 45,852 massive heart attack victims.
He said the study showed a seven percent reduction in the risk of death and a 10 percent drop in the risk of a new heart attack among people treated with the cocktail.
The cardiologists Richard Lange and David Hillis defended the use of Plavix with aspirin in an editorial in the New England Journal of Medecine, in which the studies' results were published.
"For patients receiving clot-busting therapy a combination of Plavix and aspirin appears, in fact, to be effective and safe," they wrote.
"Plavix being easier to administer and less expensive than other common treatments adds further to its attractiveness," they added.
03/09/2005 20:33 GMT