Most physicians aren’t giving patients a drug that can help them recover more quickly from a heart attack, U.S. researchers said last week.
Despite numerous studies showing that drugs known as angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors can help the recovery of people who have had heart attacks, doctors still didn’t prescribe them, said Dr. Hal Barron from the University of California San Francisco Medical Center and Genentech Inc.
Researchers looked at the records of 190,000 heart attack patients treated at 1,470 hospitals and found that only 25 percent were sent home with a prescription for an ACE inhibitor in 1994 and only 30 percent in 1996.
“ACE inhibitors are still under-utilized today,” Barron said in a statement. “Our findings are not surprising but are nonetheless quite disappointing.”
