Heart 2009;95:176-177
EDITORIALS
Challenging doctors’ lifelong habits may be good for their patients: oxygen therapy in acute myocardial infarction
1 Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou, Assistance Publique des Hôpitaux de Paris and Université René Descartes, Paris, France
2 Université Paris-Sud, EA4046, and AP-PH, Le Kremlin Bicêtre, Paris, France
Professor N Danchin, Cardiologie Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou, 20 rue Leblanc, 75015 Paris, France; nicolas.danchin@egp.ap-hop-paris.fr
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Medical history is filled with widely applied therapeutic habits that replicate longstanding practices based upon theories that have no true scientific background. Treatment of acute myocardial infarction has not escaped this general, though unfortunate, rule. Thus, in the past, lidocaine has been used systematically in patients with acute myocardial infarction because of its antiarrhythmic properties, until serious doubt was raised about a potentially toxic effect that might result in increased mortality.1 It is to the credit of Wijesinghe and colleagues that they have looked thoroughly at the evidence available for the clinical effects of oxygen therapy, a commonly used treatment at the acute stage of myocardial infarction (see page 198).2
The first cause of surprise in their report is their observation of the extraordinary discrepancy between the high incidence of myocardial infarction, affecting millions of people each year, and the paucity of scientific data on one of its
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